Well, each team of the final round has played once to give a preliminary impression. The final sixteen are a fairly good selection of European teams. Of the European teams among the first twenty in the ELO ranking (which avoids some of the problems of the FIFA ranking) only England (rank 9; rank 7 among European teams) and Denmark (rank 17) have failed to qualify. The qualifying team with the highest rank is Poland, 30th in the world and 19th in Europe. Only if England (sorry, Denmark) had qualified the selection would have been even better. I'm sure in that case I wouldn't have had to start a thread about the tournament.

We have seen the highest defeat of Italy since 1970 (against Brazil), we have seen in the same game a difficult referee decision of no offside (followed by the first goal of Holland) which the coach of Italy (and his whole team) wrongly called offside even after having seen the slow motion (don't they know the rules of the game they play?), we have seen some spectacular goals.

My prediction for the final is Portugal (after having eliminated Germany in the semi-finals) beating Holland who just can't win a final.

Wolfgang