Barbecue THAT, “mate”!! and shove THIS in a long-term, high-capital bank account with low yield but maximum security (Fat Eck’s World Cup Diary - day 18)

So apparently the South Koreans sent 4 million e-mails to the FIFA website - the site had to be shut down. E-mails of protest rained in to Swiss cyberspace from the Republic of Korea in the immediate wake of Alexander Frei’s winning goal for Switzerland on Friday night.

Frei looked offside as he latched onto the ball and rounded the keeper to net. He looked so offside, in fact, that the linesman raised his flag - just a wee bitty. The Ref, however, spotted that the ball had been played into the box by a Korean. He over-ruled his assistant and allowed a perfectly valid goal to add to a perfectly valid result.

And yet the Koreans go berserk with indignant outrage: They launch a deliberate campaign to have the game replayed through sheer weight of protesting numbers.

What a fucking cheek!

Do the Asians remember how they beat Spain in the 2002 quarter-finals? Do they remember how they beat Italy in the round prior to that four years ago?

In football ye get good luck and bad luck. The good stuff you take and enjoy - but you earn it when the bad version kicks in, because you also take that kind of luck, on the chin.

Guus Hiddink, manager of that South Korean team who gota few rubs of the green four years ago, has today felt the sting of revenge from a brave Italian side, in exactly the same round in which the Dutch manager eliminated Gli Azzuri at the 17th World Cup Finals.

Today there’s a lot of Australians feeling that Lucas Neill, a standout player and maybe off to Barca, was harshly done by in the very final second of the last-16 game with Italy. In the slow-mo replays the defender looks unlucky and Fabio Grosso - the only Italian ever to score for the national side in Scotland - was very keen to make the best of the situation: But Grosso’s dive was merely an embellishment of the foul Neill commited with his flailing, falling arms as Grosso stepped over him - clearly seen from the reverse angle.

And, more to the point, Italy’s penalty was only, at most, AS dodgy as Italy’s sending-off. Materazzi was harshly dealt with for what was, admittedly, a rash interception. But Italy, kings of trauma and setback at this World Cup, played the great remainder of the second half with a defensive elan, oh, so worthy of this nation’s great footballing tradition.

Australia choked and Italy, knowing that their one-man disadvantage may begin to tell in extra-time, won their penalty on the stroke of the 93rd minute - the very last second of normal time. Totti - to some a villain - came onto the pitch just long enough to be a hero. The coolest of spot-kicks and the coolest of European soccer nations is into the quarter-finals. The white shorts are back on and the men in the House of Savoy strip can rejoice that another Spanish name, Luis Medina Cantalejo, has evened up the works of Ecuador’s infamous Byron Moreno.

English commentators were again keen to blame the ref - they don’t like to see nations who’ve wom more World Cups than their own country progressing - but their bias would have been reveresed if this had been a RUGBY World Cup clash . Australia have done well - congratulations to them on an outstanding World Cup - but Italy were far from lucky. The fates wer far from cruel. As Guus Hiddink knows, what goes around comes around - even all the way from Daejeon to Kaiserslautern!
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After the Monday evening game you could say all the past winners of the competition who’ve made this World cup are still in this summer’s edition with two last-16 games remaining. BEFORE the Monday evening game you had to say Switzerland must be in with the best chance of this summer being an eighth nation since 1930 to lift FIFA’s top prize. Not just because Mexico, Ecuador and Australia are already out but because Portugal have too many suspensions, Ghana will surely be humped by Brazil, and Spain - well - I’ve tipped Spain to win tommorow and, even without that jinx, they never beat France anyway!

Moreover, Switzerland, having achieved their first ever World Cup finals clean-sheet in their first match this tournament, versus France, went into the game against The Ukraine having continued that defensive habit against Togo and South Korea. They were obviously sound at the back. In Alexander Frei they had a talismanic striker (ANOTHER goal-every-two-games striker at this World Cup) who was making it clear his team weren’t just here to make up the numbers. And there was a general spirit of ambition about the men from Clock-making Central.

Switzerland’s 2-0 win over Togo was the only match of this World Cup whcih I’d yet to see highlights of. I managed to dig them up on the BBC’s broadband archive just before kick-off in Cologne tonight and what I saw was at least 50,000 supporters in the Westfalen in Dortmund decked out in Swiss favours as they cheered on the Frei and Barnetta goals against the Africans. The Swiss, as they say, looked to be on a roll.

Well, we’ve just had Switzerland versus the Ukraine and the Swiss have still to concede a goal. Four games gone - clean sheets in every one.

Oh, and they’re out.

Switzerland; played four, conceded nil and gone home.

This afternoon, on my works World Cup predictor (in which, having to give my results earlier, I often predict different scores to what I do on my up-to-date-informed, equally unreliable Gers@OpenFootie predictor) I had both today’s games to finish 0-0 after normal time. The Italy game screwed me big time with a cruelty worthy the most cuckolded Sicilian peasant - ONE second remaining and the ref gives a penalty. The BBC would have you believe that nothing as exciting as this happened in the Switzerland-Ukraine game and, to be fair, it was pretty clear I was gonnae get my four predictor points after just half an hour or so of this game. But there was enough of interest:

Even when bored by the play I noticed the fans in the new Cologne stadium sitting in their shirtsleeves with big green ticket stubs stuck in their chest pockets. Bliss! Summer’s night, yer at a World Cup game and ye have a big ticket stub as a souvenier. Life doesnae get much better.

The commentary team fed us great snippets: Oleg Blokhin, the legend managing the Ukraine, had apparently said his team’s progress in this World Cup had been a Cindarella story - only this time the Pumpkin had turned into a coach!. They also told us that the Swiss fans chant “Nati’”, pronounced “Nat-eee!”, as this is the unifying nickname for tri-lingual Switzerland’s “NATIonal” football team. Is this then what they’ve been chanting for all those years which I thought was “La Suisse”!!??? Bit of a revelation to me!

And Mick McCarthy - bloody hilarious dead-pan pundit - christened Switzerland’s tactic of waiting for mistakes in the opposition ranks before hitting on the break as “parasite football”. Superb! I’ll be using that one again - but not always in a pejorative sense, I’m sure.

I And if the men with the mikes weren’t keeping us pleasantly diverted from the stalemate on-field, you could let your imagination take a wee wander round about the historic and geographic environs of this game: I wonder if there was much banter between the German-speaking Swiss fans and the local neutrals in the crowd? Were the Swiss thinking superstitiously about a reversal of roles from 1954 when West Germany miraculously won the World Cup in Switzerland? Were some of the Switzerland fans visiting Cologne again, having already been there as Bayern Munich fans? - many of the Swiss travel across to Munich for their club football and some of them run buses down to Milan. Maybe some of them were finding it hard to wish ill on Shevchenko?!

On the pitch itself, Shevchenko and Frei - the two deadly strikers of each side, with two goals each in the Group stage, hit their opponent’s bar within five minutes of each other.

That was all the real action. What followed therefater was a realisation that Switzerland are, in fact, one of the smelliest, most cowardly assortment of players to ever disgrace a pitch! I slowly began to loathe the buggers. By the time the two Cologne players added to the painful memory of being relegated last season at the Rhine Energie stadium by also missing two of Switzerland’s three penalties - Barnetta missed the other - I was off my flattened-sofa, cheering bitterly!

Ricardo Cabanas, one of those Cologne players, was a particulalrly nasty little shite, diving one minute and raking someone with his studs the next - and complaining to the ref about it all. The Swiss clearly have a lot of talent and I’ll never blame any team for being a bit dour or a bit hardy but I was instinctively shocked by the Swiss behaviour in a way I have to admit I wouldn’t have been if Argentines or Italians had committed such acts of brutality and sneakiness. It’s not right but I cannae help it …

The referee was clearly under the influence of some FIFA counter-edict in the wake of last night’s Valentin Ivanov fiasco. For every uneccessary card the Russin official issued in the Netherlands-Portugal brawl, Benito Archundia Tellez of Mexico let a malicious dive, kick or insult go unpunished. Philip Degen seems like an excellent player but hacking the legs from someone who just won the ball fairly from you and then leaping threateningly all over the bloke, slavering a double-bluff attempt to make the referee think he dived, is just too sleazy for words.

Fuck you, Switzerland - nasty neutral bastards! - I’m glad the Ukraine went through.

Shevchenko took the last penalty at Old Trafford in the 203 Champions League Final and won Milan the cup. He took the last penalty in the 2005 Champions League final and lost Milan the cup. Tonight he took his country’s first penalty in the shoot-out and joined the list of greats - Maradonna, Zico, Platini, Larsson - to miss from 12 yards on the biggest stage of all. But the game which at least provided us with the best tackle of the tournament so far - Andriy Gusin’s brilliant stretch and block on Marco Streller’s potentially fatal shot in the Ukrainian box with three minutes of extra time remaining - also provided us with this summer’s first diorama of guaranteed excitement that is the penalty shoot-out:

Oleg Gusev was the last of the three Ukraine players to get their captain off the hook as he banged home the winner. 3-0 to the former-Soviet state on pens. The recent World Cups have always provided at least 1 new, unexpected face in the semi-finals ( 1994: Bulgaria; 1998: Croatia; 2002: Turkey and South Korea) - Italy had better beware the Ukraine aren’t the side to keep that trend going. Coz it sure as hell aint gonnae be Ghana … is it?

PS - Could I just take this opportunity to apologise for a gross mistake made on this here site by this here fat bastard: I’ve mentioned that the only hat-trick of the 2002 World Cup finals was scored by Portugal’s Pauletta. This is, of course, GARBAGE: Miroslav Klose scored three agasinst the Saudi Arabians in an 8-0 win for Germany. Again, it’s what goes around coming around - I spend the whole tournament slating the English press then I go and repeat one of their facts. Thanks a lot, Peter Drury - I’ll remember that, ya bastard!

Predictions for Tuesday:

Brazil … 4 Ghana …2
Spain … 3 France … 1