Guy Bifkin

The Ghanaian Baresi!

It was a terrific tournament, arguable the best in my lifetime and the best team won.

It's been a crazy World Cup for me. I've had to fit it around a frantic work schedule rather than the other way around and it's meant I've had to cherry pick the glamour games and stay relatively sober during England's greatest run at it in 30 odd years. For the last 3 World Cups I've managed to pretty much watch every game. That ends tomorrow as I've managed to secure a well earned day off on Thursday, so I intend to give tomorrow's game the full gun ten pints and ceaseless choruses of No Surrender down the local. Watch us go crashing out now. France look the best team to me. I'd take every one of the best eleven over England's except for Giroud for Sir Harry Kane. It's probably a tough choice between Trippier and Pavard but that goal is a World Cup moment I will never forget. Croatia are tough but beatable. As an armchair tactician I'm thinking do you start with same 11 as Sweden, or do you introduce a shitkicker like Dier for Sterling or Ali to try and stultify the brilliance of Modric and Rakitic. I suspect we'll do the former but the Jose Mourinho bumboy in me thinks the latter might be the best path to victory.

It was a good show with lots of surprises. I'm glad I didn't put a bet on. Saki and Miocic getting laid out in the first, Pettis looking like the old Anthony Pettis and submitting Chiesa and Ngannou and Lewis playing out 3 rounds barely trading leather. I enjoyed the stuff at the end, I wonder if that would've been the plan had Stipe Miocic won?

We've got Sweden next lads, which usually means our good fortune against Columbia will be for naught (zero)

I'm wondering if this is the first time in my life that England have progressed further than Germany in a major tournament. First one I remember is 82.