Now that Korea has been eliminated, can we stop hearing that the World Cup was somehow tainted by their presence in the Final Four. Bad calls are a part of the game, and the calls in their win over Spain were particularly lame, but up until this year, no one ever thought there was a conspiracy led by "Third World" refs to advance a particular team.

In any event, this was a dominant German performance today; 1-0 does not quite express how one-sided this game was. With about ten minutes left, Germany had a 16-4 edge in shots on goal, and completely contained the speed game of the Koreans. Instead of playing it safe, the Germans continued to press the issue at the end, and nearly scored a couple of insurance goals in the final minutes. The goal scorer, Ballack, got hit with his second yellow card in as many games, forcing him to miss the Final. Considering how the U.S. kicked their ass in every respect but on the scoreboard last week, it is a testament to how close we are to making a serious run in 2006 or 2010.

By the way, for about ten minutes in the first half, Adelphia Cable decided to shut down its entire network to provide an Emergency Test. Odds are, nothing was going to happen anyway, but I had just had this notion at the time that they were going to return to the action, and the score would be 2-1 Korea, and the referree would be showing the red card to a whole gang of German players, and the announcers would be screaming that this was "a disgrace", etc.
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