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Time for a first delve BTL, and the various Argentina-Egypt talking points are unsurprisingly dominating.

Here’s MarkWatson1:

Well, you can bet your house on Argentina (Messi) winning the World Cup again. In the last few days we’ve seen it all collapse as a sporting spectacle. First the rescinded red card by Donald Trump and now the daylight robbery of Egypt. VAR was supposed to be used to ensure fairness but instead it’s just being used to tip the scales in favour of whoever is scheduled to go into the next round.

The Egypt goal was rightly chalked off, I was looking at the hip/leg contact and thinking it was never a foul but replays showed the clear shirt pull. The trip on Salah immediately before the Argentina goal is slightly different, it looked like foul play and if the ref had given it VAR would almost certainly not have overturned it, but he didn’t and VAR didn’t try to re-ref the incident, was hoping for a penalty to be given there, and quite possibly it should have been given but once it’s accepted that not every contact is 100% foul play then maybe not, and it wasn’t to be

Great comeback byArgentina though

Frites 4 Cheats 1. Tintin 4 Tonto 1. Some good news here, perhaps. It seems Gianni Infantino was right after all. Football has united the world. Mainly football has united the world in gleeful satisfaction at the USA exiting its own World Cup tournament as soon as possible following the great and glorious Donald Trump Mr-Fix-It intervention.

This was the tone of the immediate global reaction to the USA’s invertebrate defeat in Seattle on Monday night, soundly beaten by a righteous and highly motivated Belgium: land of beer, waffles and sporting vigilante justice. Ghent 4 Bent 1. Antwerp 4 A twerp 1. Mayonnaise 4 May-have-interfered-in-due-process 1. I can go on. How long have you got?

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