About a ball

The official ball of this World Cup tournament is called Jabulani. In Zulu, the word jabulani means "bringing joy to everyone." But what brought joy to me this afternoon? Good football where Brazil creamed North Korea 2 goals to 1, as expected. And they played a well-disciplined 90 minutes with nobody getting booked until the 88th minute.

After tucking into tonight's episode of The Cleveland Show, I went onto the next course in the second of several all-nighters I'm planning on taking during the month-long soccer-fest they call the World Cup: Honduras and Chile taking to the pitch. The quickest booking so far took place in this match, with Carlos Carmona getting yellow-carded 4 minutes into the first half. Matias Fernandez followed suit within 15 minutes. Then, Wilson Palacios was booked for "a series of offences" one minute before Chile scored the first goal. No goals or bookings took place in the second half and as such, Chile won 1-0.

The final two countries were next: Spain and Switzerland. The score was 1-0 in Switzerland's favour, but Swiss players copped all 4 of the yellow cards dished out over the course of the game.

So there we have it: all 32 nations have played at least one game, and all 7 countries to have ever won a World Cup were among the 32. And not a single match was without at least one booking or the controversial buzz of the vuvuzelas.