i don’t need to tell you what happened, and if you’ve been cave dwelling over the last day or so the link will take care of that.

i said yesterday that i didn’t think we could afford to get off to a slow start, but i’m very happy to be proven wrong. i guess in all fairness, we really started the match quite well and not that slow at all. i missed the live coverage of the first 20 minutes, but having watched it in replay last night we certainly had all the running and were unfortunate not to be a goal up. and then. then we had the misfortune of going a goal down. sure, it was a pretty ordinary call and the referee has since admitted making a mistake and apologised, but i have to agree with various media outlets that schwarzer probably could have played that ball a little better. still, luckily it all turned out to be academic.

after that point i think we looked very flat. even though we still had slightly the better of position, japan looked far more likely to convert their possession into points and it wasn’t until tim cahill popped up and once again pounced on some scrappy ball that we really looked anything like the socceroos of the first 15 to 20 minutes. amazing what a surge of adrenaline will do. i suppose it was a combination oppressive conditions, which were felt by japan as well, and, despite what the players might say if you asked them, first time jitters. hopefully playing a hard match, where all looked lost at the 88th minute, will have helped to work out some of the kinks and settle the nerves.

in a quick report from fantasy land, how i would have loved to see aussie guus go the tonk on the sidelines when a fifa official blocked his view of the replay of the japanese goal. good to see him getting stuck in, in any case.