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Your support makes all the difference.* Franz Beckenbauer has no doubt as to who will meet in Yokohama on 30 June. "The final will be Germany against Argentina," Beckenbauer told the German football magazine Kicker.
* The Italy captain Paolo Maldini, playing in his fourth World Cup, says the first round provides firm proof that the global game has changed dramatically. "There is not such a difference any more between big teams and those with less of a history," he said. "It is not like the old days when the group stages were bland and the knock-out stage was when it got serious. Now the World Cup is serious from the outset."
* The man dubbed "a clown" by Brian Clough was scathing of Poland's 4-0 drubbing by Portugal yesterday. "The second half was a total disaster," said Jan Tomaszewski, who made enough saves in one infamous night at Wembley to knock England out of the 1974 World Cup. His coach back then, Kazimierz Gorski, who took the side to third place in West Germany, agreed: "We have too little skill and energy to win."
* Cleaners at the Yokohama International Stadium who were assigned to the Japan dressing room were left with an easy night's work after the win over Russia. Although the Japanese are renowned for their cleanliness, Fifa officials were still astounded with the scene that greeted them when the players left. Not an empty champagne bottle, nor discarded bandage in sight as the history-makers cleaned up every last bit of their mess before leaving. One witness said: "It was cleaner than when they arrived."
* Things could get very slippery for Nigeria and England in Osaka, with a typhoon possibly making for wet knock-out stages. The season's fourth storm, dubbed Noguri, was hovering far from any venues, but Japan's Meteorological Agency expected it to brush the main islands today, dousing central Japan in rain before passing by Tokyo sometime tomorrow.
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