Friday

Tonight is K's little brother's last with us, and after a busy week we decide to stay in - with wine for the grown ups and a wee bottle of cider for the underage guest. After some dinner we stick on the Uruguay v Ghana quarter final match. It's been a horrendous two days without football until this game; after the World Cup had weaned me onto three games a day and even four at the end of the group stages, it seems impossibly cruel to have suddenly cut off the flow completely for a big chunk of my working week.

In fact, "impossibly cruel" is the order of the day in terms of the end of this game. Ghana, the last African side still in the competition and in fact the only African team to have escaped the group stage, find themselves at 1-1 against Uruguay at the very end of extra time in Johannesburg (we're talking 120+1 here) when the ball pings around the Uruguayan goalmouth until it finds a Ghanaian head to send it goalwards - whereupon Luis Suarez sticks his hand up and stops the ball from crossing the line. Suarez is sent off for handball, which he doesn't seem particularly bothered about - after all, his team were milliseconds away from exiting the competition - and Asamoah Gyan steps up to take the penalty.

Crushingly, he opts for power and the ball pings off the crossbar; sending the match into an actual penalty shootout. Unsurprisingly, given that they were one penalty kick away from becoming the first African team to ever reach a World Cup Semi Final, they are hardly composed in the shoot-out, and Luis Suarez and co go through.

It's genuinely heartbreaking, and the scenes of Gyan and his teammates crying their eyes out - Gyan himself seemingly barely able to stand - are hard to watch, and will remain as potent memories of the drama of this World Cup and the importance it's had for Africa as a footballing continent. Pele said that an African side would win the World Cup by the year 2000 - wrong, but I'm sure he and everyone else would have gladly have accepted a Semi Final by 2010 instead. Not to be, however.

Mike and Ant pop round for the closing stages of the match, and join us in the oohs and aahs of the final minutes. A bit gutted after the game, we take our minds off things by playing a bit of Scrabble, which K's little brother scores for us in between games of Angry Birds and Doodle Jump on my iPhone. After the game (Mike won, me second) we sit around and drink a little more. K's brother soon tires of us and heads into the other room to play Facebook on my computer - or whatever it is teenagers do online now - and the guys eventually head off around 1am.