The Socceroos had a welcome return to form this morning in beating Qatar away 3-1. Brett Emerton was played forward and scored twice. Harry Kewell scored and could have had two more. China lost against Iraq 2-1 and is now at the bottom of our group and can’t get through to the next round. This means that the match against Australia in Sydney later this month isn’t that significant. Hopefully it will be a good game anyway.

Apart from World Cup qualifiers Euro 2008 is also happening at the moment. Some notable results:

• the host nations, Austria and Switzerland, both lost their opening games, to Croatia and the Czech Republic respectively, (Czech Republic then lost 3-1 to Portugal)
• the Netherlands belted Italy, the current World Cup champions, 3-0,
• Spain, despite being regular under-achievers, did the same to Russia 4-1,
• the current Euro champions, Greece, went down 2-0 to Sweden in their opening game,
• Germany looked strong in beating Poland 2-0, the 2 goals being scored by Polish-born Lukas Podolski.

Some games are being broadcast on SBS TV