THEY think it's all over - yes, whatever, and the rest.

The Brazilians were good, don't get me wrong - easily the best of a poor bunch.

The Germans were typically dour and well organised, but don't have those three or four players of the highest quality who can make the difference.

Argentina seemed rudderless when Veron was on the field and - great player as he was - putting Batistuta in the team ahead of Crespo should be a criminal offence.

The French shocked everybody, but the gaping holes in their geriatric defence are there for all to see while the Portuguese looked like a team a couple of years past their best.

Who else? England I discussed last week, Italy where unlucky (and I'm not just saying that because I had money on them) , which left various 'plucky underdogs' the best of whom, Turkey, may have made it to Yokohama if they had been in the other side of the draw.

And that, above all else, is the lesson for the future from this event.

The seedings need to be made fair, with the top eight countries set apart until the quarter finals, and the top four split not forced to cancel each other out.

That might lift Germany 2006 above the occasionally mundane on the pitch action, which has made Korea/Japan 2002 only a fair to middling version of the world's greatest sporting events.

While the final didn't take place until Sunday, my world cup summer finally reached fulfilment last week, when, for the first time in ages, I saw a complaint about the 'amount of sport on TV'.

'Why is there so much sport on television?' A letter to a newspaper whinged.

'I hope other viewers will join me in protesting against this blah, blah, blah, blah etc.'

No sporting season is complete without the sound of moaners who can't quite bring themselves to reach the remote control and turn over to the David Attenborough documentary on BBC2.

If there is too much of anything on TV, then it's got to be mind-numbing soap operas, closely followed by insipid quiz shows, grim crime thrillers and many other insults to the intelligence.

In fact, apart from the sport (and 24) is there anything else worth watching on the box? Still, there is something about sport which seems to make certain people think they have a divine right to sulk, writing to Points of View eulogising about the nonsense which rots their brains 365 days a year.

Hypocrisy rules OK.

Still, the latter day Mary Whitehouse brigade are amateurs in the face of another thing that gets me hot under the collar; the 'anti-Olympic movement'.

This international anti-globalisation (surely shome mishtake?) coalition consists of various city-based groups who try to keep the IOC away from their backyard.

The crux of their case is that the games brings few benefits to the poor and downtrodden of the city, with vast amounts of money spent on what they like to call 'sports palaces' instead of alleviating poverty.

Strangely, you never see this ramshackle bunch complaining about the millions of pounds given out year round to ' worthy' arts projects - opera houses, art galleries, theatre groups offering shows so utterly full of poncy drivel that not even the keenest admirer of the Emperor's new clothes can take a crumb of entertainment from the whole unforgivable affair.

Why not attack 'arts palaces?' - surely the 'poor' benefit even less from £120 tickets to see some fat bloke sing about being a jack-of-all-trades than from sporting events which bring in thousands of tourists and create hundreds of new jobs?

Could it be because the leaders of this movement tend also to be artsy types who immerse themselves in 'difficult' (ie uncommercial, little watched and often hugely subsidised) material in order to prove their intellectualism?

If modern, democratic cities forego the Olympics, where will it end up? Why, in totalitarian states such as China, where it is used to glorify regimes which do things to the poor downtrodden masses that even the most reactionary of our leaders couldn't begin to contemplate.

But then, the 'bread not circuses' brigade don't have to trudge past the poor of Beijing or Baghdad on their way to the opera, do they?

Under normal conditions, this would be the moment when you columnist casually mentions that he is giving it a rest for the summer, at least until a time when there is some football to talk about.

Given that Morecambe's first pre season friendly is due to take place only 13 days after Cafu and Ronaldo's celebration in the Far East, there really isn't much point.

See you next week.