20:50

I sat down with New Zealand coach Tom Sermanni this morning, who is one of the nicest people in football. I asked him what he thought of a column in the NZ Herald following their loss to the Dutch, which had the headline: ‘Sermanni has struck cultural chord with Football Ferns but the game sucks’.

The Scotsman was bemused by this, and offered quite a thoughtful response: “You have to play as you have to play. It’s a case of being pragmatic. If he wanted us to play like Barcelona, then the game sucked. If he wanted us to be a NZ team that went out to be competitive, to try and win the game in the way that we could, then we didn’t suck.” You’d have to say more of the same in this game...