Kurwa Polska

For those of you whose Polish isn't up to scratch, that's me cursing at Poland. There is a reason for this, as you will now be told the tale.

At the college bar on Sunday (& Monday) there was a mightily inspired World Cup tournament of PES. Which is immense - it's hard to explain how mighty playing PES on a 42" plasma screen is, but it's damn amazing. It's also entertaining to watch an entire bar cheering, ooohing and ahhing over a computer game. It was great fun.

The groups were formed as in the real world cup, with appropriate substitutions when there was a team that wasn't on the game, and everyone was drawn a team at random. And knowing my luck, I got Poland. I thought this was a fairly average pick - a medium-level side - in a reasonable group. However, they're a lot worse than I thought.

With five minute games, and my typical inability to score, I struggled to a 0-0 game against a rampant Costa Rica. Having gone back to my room and checked out the Polish squad, I came back with a new lineup and new formation for the game against Germany, and completely dominated another 0-0 draw and was unlucky not to win.

In my last game, I needed to beat Ecuador to progress. My typical inability to score kicked in again, and changing my formation after 60 minutes to go for a more aggressive playstyle led to my downfall as my two man defense conceded a goal in the 90th minute to put me out with no goals from three games.

The eventual tournament was won by Brazil, beating Sweden 1-0 in the final. The shock of the tournament was Tunisia, who qualified ahead of Spain and then beat Argentina on penalties. Poland finished bottom of their group and went home with their tails between their legs. However, after looking at their squad later in the day, I discovered that Poland were actually the second worst team in the competition, according to PES, better than only Saudi Arabia. Even Iran were better than them. So, bugger.

But it was still great fun.