Jul 2006

No travel, no game tickets – just a day to see a bit of Heidelberg and catch the games on the tube. We took the vernacular up to see the view of the city.
We had a small brunch at the top of the mountain/hill – it was a really nice view. It took two cars/tracks to get to the top, with the second, smaller one testing Kate’s slight fear of heights. On the way back down we wandered the castle grounds which were very well maintained. The castle also had a very nice view of the city.
One of the tops of the castle had half broken away many years ago and it was quite interesting to see.
There was an odd fountain at the end of one of the courtyards, the only thing odder was the girls posing for their picture with it.

We all met up at an Irish Pub near the middle of town for a rare, full M6 watching of the Italy/Australia game. The game was pretty evenly matched when the referee ejected one of the Italian players for a foul worthy of a yellow at most – yes, a bad call against the Italians – amazing. The game pretty much continued pretty even with a few chances for each side. And even with the 3 minutes of stoppage time, this game seem destine for extra time. But the referee made his worst “mistake” of the game by awarding a PK to the Italian side as time expired. Phil so eloquently summed up this game, as another “classic piece of Italian shit”. Somehow the Italian scrapped through again on what some would later call the worse referee call of the cup (though the non-calls for Togo when playing the Swiss were worse in my opinion). This will probably go down as the worst refereeing that the cup has ever seen…

We wandered to the old part of the city for the evening match. No one we met could stop talking about the Italy call. I was still undecided if the referee had cheated or just made a horrible mistake, but either way, the Italians were through. We found another bar with no crowd and a large screen TV and sat right in front – I guess the Ukraine/Swiss match up didn’t interest so many. The game was very uneventful as both sides mounted few quality chances – a typical dig in type of game. Contrary to the night before, this referee let the players play with several hard fouls going uncalled and rarely carded anyone – it was a good thing that the Russian referee didn’t handle this game either. This referee was probably one of the better ones for the tourney, but then again both teams were European and neither a traditional powerhouse. The first match to go to penalty kicks and unfortunately for the Swiss, they were really poor at it. So, without ever having allowed a goal in the cup, the Swiss were out – how funny.