The Campaign Builder's Guild

And Italy takes France 5-3.  :cry:

Now we can give cricket our full attention.

After Germany took down Portugal 3 - 0 thanks solely to the individual qualities of Bastian Schweinsteiger, the final turned out to be a surprisingly interesting match. After Zinedine Zidane helped France take the lead by scoring a penalty kick (though just barely, it jumped back out of the goal immediately) and Marco Materazzi evened the score with his head from a corner kick, the match was even for a very long time. After 90 minutes, we went into 30 minutes of extra time. During the second half of the extra time, Materazzi provoked Zidane by saying some apparently unpleasant things, after which Zidane knocked him down with a head-butt on the chest. This was noticed by the assistant-referee, which led to Zidane getting the red card, a sad end to his long and beautiful career. The match was played out, and in the end, the Italians were more accurate in penalty shoot-out, scoring 5 out of 5. Trezeguet missed for France, making Italy this year's World Cup winner.

Marco Materazzi received a fine and will not be allowed to play for two matches for provoking Zidane.

Zinedine Zidane received a fine and will not be allowed to play for three matches (though this means little, considering his career has ended) for knocking down Materazzi.

In the meantime, Ialy's euphoria ended quickly, as the corruption scandal once again came to attention. It seems very likely now that some of Italy's top teams will be playing in the B-Series next season.

That's it for World Cup 2006. I for one had lots of fun.

Cheers!
Túrin

I was wondering if Zidane's red card came from the refs glancing up at the slow-mo shots of the action; during the game, they never once confirmed that a ref actually saw it first-hand.

Soccer is a rather backward game. The refs aren't allowed to watch slow-motions, because their mistakes are one of the charming sides of the game, or some nonsense along those lines.