For those of you who don't know, ESPN360 is available for trial use. Which means that you can stream World Cup right to your desktop. As much as I think that's a great idea for March Madness, I don't know if we want to go from increased sick days to bandwidth use taking down the Internets wholesale.

Getting back to the beautiful game, I can't claim Cooch's level of performance in picking the preliminary results, but I did OK. I tabbed 12 of the 16 teams that went on, though I only had eight in proper position. As for the four I missed:

* Ghana over the US - I prefaced a US trip to the second round as blatant homerism. Those who picked Ghana instead either did the same thing, or were drunk when they made their picks. Don't try to deny it.

* Australia over Japan - I work with a guy from Liverpool, and he warned me ahead of time about the Socceroos. I looked at their 30 year disappearing act from the Cup and figured that their tournament would be like the US visit to Italy in 1990. Clearly, I was wrong. I still think people who called this were fondly thinking of Foster's and Nicole Kidman when doing so, but I do know at least one reasonably knowledgable fan who saw this coming.

* Ecuador over Poland - OK, proabaly should have taken 2002 to heart, but that was a tough group.

* Ukraine over Tunisia - I actually spent a fair amount of time on this one, but went with Tunisia based on having been to the Cup before and the questionable health of Shevchenko. I also figured one African team would advance, and really, they seemed like the best candidate.