The officiating has been quite good at this Cup. Until today.

1. The Germany-Serbia referee handed out yellow cards for minor fouls, leading to two yellows for Klose, leaving Germany with 10 and changing the entire match. The Serbs scored minutes after Klose's ejection and held on to win, although the Germans, even with 10 men, had the better of play. The card-happy ref changed the game; I don't see ze Germans losing with 11. (Heck, they almost leveled with 10 when Vidic had an absurd handball in the box, but Podolski missed the penalty.) Terrible officiating by the Spanish referee.

2. The US-Slovenia official was, unbelievably, worse. Coverage of the wrongfully disallowed winning goal is all over the news, so I'll just post an email I sent to a longtime friend about the match:

"To quote Didier Drogba, the referee was 'a f*cking disgrace.' Not only was there no offside and no foul by the Americans on the should-have-been-winning goal, Michael Bradley was affirmatively fouled.

Of course, I can't really blame the referee, because the US team itself was disgraceful during the first half. The strategy of not marking attacking players while simultaneously not blocking passing lanes was, surprisingly, unsuccessful. Yet I have no room to criticize, because my big thing was to bring on Torres to start, which Bradley did, and that turned out to be a terrible idea. Torres was rubbish."

Additional thoughts:

--Michael Bradley played an outstanding game, even before the enormously impressive finish on the tying goal. Every time he touched the ball, I felt either relieved or hopeful, depending on where the ball was on the field.

--Because England drew Algeria 0-0, the US advances with a win against Algeria, and even with a tie under some circumstances. The difficulty is that Algeria was the very definition of "tidy in possession" today against England, and look exactly like the sort of team that can take advantage of the inevitable US defensive miscue and then run out the clock. We'll see on Wednesday.

FF