48 hours: Now give me a shoot-out

This World Cup is just one small step away from being as perfect as a tournament can get so far. Brilliant goals, great individual skills, long passages of thrilling tit-for-tat action, clashes of styles, refereeing controversies, passionate fans ... the list goes on.

Think 2006 World Cup and you can already think Australia v Croatia, Argentinian Maxi Rodriguez's chest-to-volley winner against Mexico, Joe Cole's stunner against Sweden, Sweden's penalty miss agony against Germany, the rising confidence and ability of the so-called minnow countries, and so on. Fantastic.

At the time of writing, there hadn't been a penalty shoot-out yet. But please, please, there must be one soon.

Shoot-outs are unfair-yet-thrilling burdens on knackered players but, hey, they are all well paid for their troubles.

It certainly doesn't pay to miss if you want to avoid the Hall of Infamy. A clutch of Englishmen have had their names etched in the wrong column for famous penalty shoot-out misses.

Defender Gareth Southgate, thought he and his wife were getting away from the pressure-cooker world of football, visiting a remote Buddhist temple in Bali during the mid-1990s only to find a monk approaching him with the words: "You Gareth Southgate, England penalty drama".

Is there any better drama in sport than witnessing the agonising walks to the penalty spot, where legs of rubber and frayed nerves must find the energy and composure to plant the ball past those Indian rubber men in goal.

Failure is pure agony, even though the defeated players' demeanour may sometimes be of cool resignation. Success is often followed by relief rather than jubilation, except of course after the final winner. Gooooooaaaaaaal.


For a World Cup laugh, there's already been the blunder by the English referee Graham Poll, who failed to send Croatian Josip Simunic off after issuing him with a second yellow card.

Poll is not known for his humility and the English press, while lamenting the fact that this error may have deleted their country's best hope of representation in the final, has danced on Poll's grave error - which involved having to send off the Croatian for what was actually his third yellow card.

Poll had mistakenly written the name of Australian No 3 Craig Moore in his book, instead of Croatian No 3 Simunic, and so the referee almost certainly penned his own unhappy ending to the tournament.

For a follow up giggle, Fifa president Sepp Blatter reckoned Poll needed better back-up from his fellow officials, and that one of them "should have intervened and run on the field and said 'stop, stop'."

Sepp, Sepp. Aren't those jokers all wired up?

Isn't this the age of high-tech communications? What is this - an Auckland bus-stop?

For the English whistler, it's a case of being Poll-axed, having been lowered by his own third card.

But there is another matter of officiating that could do with scrutiny and adjusting.

Fifa took a small but significant step in the right direction a few years ago when they decreed that an attacker was on-side if he was level with the second-to-last opponent, rather than having to be behind him as was the previous rule.

It is a tough decision for linesmen to get right, as it can involve high-speed calculations including having to note the exact moment the attacking side plays a through ball. This act may take place many metres away from where the offside occurs.

But still, the offside advantage is going to the defending side too often, and often wrongly, at this World Cup.

The linesmen may be reticent about making a wrong decision that leads to a goal in such high-pressure situations, preferring the relative obscurity of unfairly ruling out goals and scoring opportunities instead.

It happened again during the sudden-death match between Argentina and Mexico, with the Argentinians having a match-winning goal ruled out close to the end of normal time.

Instead, they had to battle through extra-time - which will play into Germany's hands when these two heavyweights clash in Berlin in the quarter-finals.

The rule may allow a player to be level with the defender, but this World Cup suggests that it is still not a truly level playing field when it comes to offside. Football would be an even better game if it was.

* It would be nice to send a bit of praise the television commentators' way. Trouble is, I haven't a clue who they are.

There was, for instance, a nice line during Argentina's extra-time win over Mexico, when the Man With The Mike reckoned a young Mexican player was getting to the point of being up past his bed-time.

Well said, ummm, errr, whoever you are. Have I missed something, because it appears Sky does not believe introductions are necessary.

The strong impression about New Zealand's World Cup coverage is that we've been landed with the cut-price package involving the cattle-class commentary teams of one.

But even still, surely a few name tags aren't beyond the budget.

I haven't, during the entire tournament, witnessed one commentator being introduced, or given a tag-line.

At halftime, an expert analyst appears from nowhere with the same anonymous treatment.

Who are these people? Why should they be allowed in my living room? Call it curiosity - I just want to know.