The original headline for this piece was going to be ‘…And Then There Was One’ as in there’s only one place left in the finals: congratulations to Algeria, France, Greece, Portugal and Slovenia, all of whom have qualified before. The winner of Uruguay v Costa Rica (KO 11pm GMT) will claim the last place.

However, the evening’s events were overshadowed as Ireland were particularly unlucky after they lost to France, courtesy of a William Gallas goal featuring a blatant handball by Thierry Henry who ought to be absolutely ashamed of himself. France may have qualified but judged on their performance tonight they’ll be extremely lucky to get out of the group stages; I wonder if they’ll be drawn with Algeria. The referee was Martin Hansson of Sweden and it’ll be interesting to see if he makes it on to the officials list for the Finals.

An interesting bit of trivia to end with tonight: Algeria and Slovenia‘s winning goals were scored by Antar Yahia and Zlatko Dedic, both of whom play for VfL Bochum in the Bundesliga.