So anyway, the sportsball competition thing. England vs Belgium on Thursday, and with both sides having 8 goals for and two against, there has to be a winner. If the scores are level at full time, it comes down to sudden death, which is never good news for England, is it, Gareth Southgate? but in any case both countries are through to the elimination stage whoever wins, the only difference it makes is who they face next. Group G closing points will be 9, 6, 3, 0 (which is a nice, pretty pattern) or 9, 6, 1, 1 depending how Panama and Tunisia fare against each other. If Brazil beat or hold Serbia on Wednesday, Switzerland are through to the next stage whatever happens (and so my pound in the office sweepstakes is not immediately wasted) but if Serbia manage to beat Brazil, then Switzerland need at least to hold Costa Rica to a draw to pass the group stage. In Group B, the points also stand at 4, 4, 3, 0 -- a volatile combination, if there ever was one. Spain play Morocco in Kaliningrad; which used to be called Konigsburg, and was famous for having seven bridges and the impossibility -- first proved formally by Leonhard Euler --of devising a route which crossed each one only once. The two banks of the River Pregel and the islands are vertexes on a non-Eulerian graph, because there are more than two vertexes with an odd number of edges. Not all the bridges are there anymore, and the surviving ones actually make up the edges of an Eulerian graph. It's like rain on your wedding day .....