Nippon! (cha-cha-cha) (said with a football chant voice!)

Japan got knocked out of the world cup last night after a 4-1 loss to Brazil. They never really had a hope in hell of winning but I think everyone in Japan (me included) was hoping for some kind of miracle. When they scored in the 34th minute and spent a few glorious minutes ahead of Brazil, I am sure everyone who got up in the middle of the night to watch the game began to get hopeful that maybe.. just maybe Japan might pull it off. Sadly it wasn`t meant to be and thanks to their poor performance against Australia and their lacklustre draw with Croatia, the Japanese team are on the way back to Japan. I have very mixed feelings, on one hand I am happy that England is through to the next round and could go far thanks to having a relatively easy group but at the same time I am sad that Japan has gone out. You could argue that it is because the Japanese players are cuter than the English ones but I think it is more because I have always championed the underdog. As a result I think I am going to start supporting Australia instead! LOL! I don`t think anyone expected them to do so well so it will be cool to see how they progress. That said, I am pretty sure that the coverage of the World Cup will be fairly limited on Japanese TV now that the national team is no longer a contender. Looking at the game information on the internet, it looks like the Aussies and Croatia fought hard and there were THREE red cards during the match. Not very gentlemanly!! ;-)