The thumping we should have seen coming

3D black and white TVs? :)

Fair comments and very relevent. Chris australia are wearing the blue an d dark blue away strip because in all game there must be a dark and light team as the majority of the viewers of the cup are watching black and white tvs.

Fantastic post. I had never heard of the 1/2 before probably because I have never been interested in Italian football (grew up on 442, 442 and 442). The Japanese actualy used that against Cameroon I believe (admittedly I fell asleep) with Honda and their real striker. Foz was embarassing on the World cup show.

You are correct... the gesture has nothing to do with the heart in Australia, it is about covering one's medals and honours when passing the cenotaph on any memorial day. The idea is that those who have been killed in action deserve a far greater honour than any survivor who gets a chance to display his or her rewards and recognition thus they hide them. Hand on the heart during the national anthem... more American drivel! BTW... what's with the blue socceroos uniform... I've never seen a national team in blue!!!!!

You remind me that there are two common views out there that I would like to tackle. Australia played 442 I honestly doubt that Pim set out to play 442 with zero recognised strikers. C'mon folks, think about it, Pim is not that much of a dill, give him some credit. As Mick is suggesting, more than likely it was a tweaked 4231, or what the Italians might refer to as 4-2-3 1/2 - 1/2, i.e. what you might try when you don't have any fair dinkum centre-forwards in the team, or a classic attempt at having your cake and eating it too. Timmy and Garcia would have been instructed to swap positions throughout to mix it up a tiny bit. Pim's idea would been to have had the smallest amount of space between the back four and what was essentially a mid four, with two DMs in between. It ain't a bad idea, but the problem was this: Germany are just too good, full stop. To have Jase marking Lahm is not the worst idea I've ever heard, but he was just too good. Ditto for the rest. If Ozil was more tightly marked, one of the others would have popped up. When you have two cenre-halves who aren't bad with the ball, then naturally the players are going to be drawn forward, and that's when it all starts to come apart. Those first two goals, every bit of them, were absolutey top shelf. It's unlikely you'll see a better headered goal than Klose's for the rest of the tournament. YOu might quibble that Neill's marking wasn't tight enough, that Lahm should have been closed down quicker, that Schwarzer should have beaten Klose to the ball, etc etc - but really, every aspect of the delivery and the header was so perfect, it's silly to point fingers. It wasn't the scoreline, it was the performance Well, to be honest, can't have one without the other. It's possible to have the same performance and end up with a nil-all draw, and people wouldn't be dispairing as much. Schwarzer might have got more of a glove on the first goal, he might have got a touch on the ball before it got to Klose on the second, Muller's shot could have hit the post and bounced straight out, Cacau's finish was actually not as precise as it should have been (virtually went straight at Schwarzer with a gaping goal mouth), etc. etc. As a further example, people point to the effort against Italy, as something to be proud of, but people talk it up a bit too much. Luca Toni had three header chances inside the first 15 minutes - all of them easier than the one Klose put away! Two of them in, and well, it's Germany vs Australia all over. People forget that Italy absolutely dominated that first half in much the same way that Germany dominated this one. The big difference last time - we had a fair dinkum centre-forward - that we don't now really ain't Pim's fault.

Rustenburg is 1154m above sea level, JHB is 1753m above

Let's see how the Kiwis go first before completely writing off the A-League, shall we? ;)

Das We can argue semantics about formations. I reckon Tim was playing pretty deep in the first 20 minutes for someone supposedly playing up front. Certainly we were playing 4231 when Garcia was moved to the left half way through the first half and culina centrally. You may be right about the pressing game but the alternative is we park the Bus. If we had we may have avoided the Podolski goal and Kloses early miss. We would I suggest have conceded more goals like Kloses (particularly if Valeri gives Lahm that much time) and who is to say we would not have been picked apart in a different way. I suspect Ozil would be a handful for teams that back him off. Backing off also means you have to make a lot more tackles in central areas. Maybe Pim thought Grella, Moore and Neill are a bigger risk for cards and free kicks in dangerous areas if we sit on the top of the penalty box.

I suppose the obvious point to make is that we are definitely a football nation, but just in a very different way to most of the world: we have 4 kinds of football.

We did start with a 442. if you hear the interview with Craig Moore on SBS website he essentially confirmed it saying that the team tried to change thing and played positively but it backfired. In any case I didn't mind Garcia starting up front (although if you are going press, holman should have gotten the gig as he is supposed to be known for his workrate and disrupting the build up of the opposition). I just thought the pressing game was a monumental tactical mistake (we tried playing that way against the USA which I thought was an experimental one off thing and it failed miserably) However in the second half pim changed back to the traditional 4231. This was when we started playing decent football and german weren't monopolizing possession and tearing us apart until Cahill got send off.

"We didn’t lose because of the selections, we lost because our players were not able to handle the speed and movement of the Germans and the quality of their ball movement." Spot on

There is no consistent narrative to the criticism. Some say we surrendered by not picking a striker. By contrast others say we were to aggresive playing a high defensive line and supposedly a 442. I actually liked the side put out and I think it was Pim's traditional 4 2 3 1. I think Culina was played wide left to try and curtail Philip Lahm's contribution. Garcia is a striker and looked better than Kennedy had in any of the warm ups. Yes Moore and Niell are slow (but so are all the other options especially Beauchamp). The high defensive line was actually an aggresive move that Pim got very wrong. We didn't lose because of the selections, we lost because our players were not able to handle the speed and movement of the Germans and the quality of their ball movement. This is not the time for wholesale changes. Kewell, Bresciano and Holman should come in for consideration. Culina should revert to holding midfield and either Grella or Valeri miss out.

James W, Perhaps the NSW State of Origin selectors picked the team given how many players were selected out of position? It has been proven many times before - from New Zealand at the RWC, to the ongoing woes for the Blues State of Origin side in the NRL, to the Football World Cup in South Africa - that the selection of players in positions outside of their core competancies is a recipe for disaster. Yesterday morning was yet another case in point.

I demand a Royal Comission! Seriously, we just don't have the talent. Our defence isn't good enough against the big teams. Those germans were always going to go through.

Tommy Oar signed for a Dutch club a few weeks ago... Not really an A-League player. But then nobody is going to respond to this comment because it's ridiculous. If you think we can build a competative team on the world scale, even to the level we were at five yeras ago, by only picking A-League players you obviously don't have the slightest understanding of, well, anything.

Try to explain to them the context of the sporting culture. Explain that their one game - football - is actually four different competing sports in Australia, with Association Football only recently getting some ascendency. I remember a German friend of mine commenting on how poor the quality of the A-League was and how it went against the reputation of Australia as being a sporting powerhouse. He was only new here, so was utterly ignorant of just how complex the sporting culture of Australia is and so I took it upon myself to enlighten him. I explained to him that him criticising our poor A-League was like me making a snide remark about how undeveloped the German rugby tournament is. I took him to a Swans game, a State of Origin match and the Bledisloe cup (we're very good mates) as a way of introducing him to the diversity that exists within the Australian football landscape. Most foreigners don't have any concept of the multi-code environment, so you really have to explain it to them

What i want to know is this, when are we going to stop worrying about overseas comps and start worrying about the a-league. Screw those clowns. See, this gets me firewd up, i would tell every player who leaves oz to forget there international career with the roos. Other codes do this, well rugby league does. Come-on, lads, shown some fight, that young ore guy, Tommy Ore, put him in for a start, lets build a future, a-league rocks.

I agree that just like the Brazil game in 2006 we were never going to get 3 points against one of the true heavyweights. There are still 6 points on offer and that will be enough to get out of the group. The psychology in 2006 was that we had already beaten Japan by the time we played Brazil so we weren't upset like this. I suspect that a lot of the angst is because it appears that Mr Conservative Pim had a brain snap. I expected a repeat of the plan against the Netherlands; it was not pretty but it gave us a reasonably well deserved 0-0. Instead the bloke we figured as having an unchanging dull grey suit turned up for the big occasion wearing speedos and body paint. Which Pim will we have for the remaining games? The other worry is that suspicions about the squad being much weaker than 2006 appear to be correct. It's partly bad luck - injuries to Kisnorbo, Kewell, Williams. It's also that he was able to get the proto geriatrics to do enough to qualify and therefore he expected the miracles to continue - in the cases of Moore and Grella obviously not true, and Chippers maybe needs to be farther forward - that's where he was successful for Basle this season. It's probably also that initially the A league was not well coached so Oz based players have regressed [there are hopeful signs for the future with Lavicka and Van t'Schip etc]. It's also bad decisions about where to go made by players like Milligan, Carney and Carle who should have developed for this tournament. In any case, Verbeek will reveal himself as either genius or fool in the succeeding games. Everyone makes mistakes; it's a matter of what you learn from them. Let's hope he's smarter than he was for the first game - and lucky as well.

Brett, It definately seems that Australia has punched above its weight in regard to travelling fans. Assuming (generously_ that there are 300K travelling fans in SA, Australian easily acconts for more then 10% of them. I agree that there was easily 30K of aussies in the crowd. the word is that there be even more for the 2nd match. i am interested in where the problem lies. people to easily blame the GFC. is it the fact that some smaller european nations made it- Slovenia, Denmark, Serbia etc?

Sure, that'll help. We can go back to beating American Samoa 31-0. Seriously, what are you thinking?