But given his sneers about the despised "Old Europe," somebody on Rumsfeld's staff or (more likely) among his diplomatic acquaintances might have pointed out that Old Europe, which also happen to be Rumsfeld's NATO allies, scooped the pool, filling all four semi-final slots.

Germany and Portugal were knocked out in the semi-finals, and will now play a consolation game to see who wins third place.

Even though the Arab and the Asian and the African and the American teams from North and South were all knocked out before the semi-finals, most of the world has still been watching, despite the dominance of the defensive game that has led to so many low-scoring matches and too many penalty shoot-outs.

The marvelous Brazilians were never given enough space to run free and play the beautiful game they invented. The stolidly unimaginative English team got to the quarter-finals in dismal style. Too many teams played with just one striker forward near the opponent's goal, keeping the defense permanently overmanned. And yet still we watched.

The number of fouls broke all records, and so did the number of send-offs by the referees, flashing an unprecedented number of red cards. Some of the refereeing has been positively bizarre.

And yet ironically, one of the most inspiring games to watch was the United States draw with Italy, when the referee's red cards condemned nine Americans to play ten Italians in a heroic match that took both teams to heights of achievement that overcame their exhaustion and became a celebration of the athletic spirit.

It is too easy to dismiss the World Cup as an old-fashioned and even sometimes disturbing celebration of nationalism, and in the past international games have been disfigured by pitched battles between the hooligans among the pugnacious British fans and their hosts or visitors.

This time they were stopped, on temporary restraining orders that suspended their passports, and some discreet preventive arrests by the German police, tipped off by plain-clothes police from other countries to the presence of known trouble-makers. Civil libertarians might have some questions about this, but the efficient policing made for a better World Cup.

And the German hosts also went to some effort to overcome that other curse of the game, the racism and monkey chants that used to greet black and brown players when they started to appear in European sides.

The fact is that with modern migration patterns, more and more countries are getting teams that look like their native populations. France with its 6 million North and West African immigrants and its Caribbean islands fielded 16 non-whites in its national squad.

This is not just a matter of color. Two of Germany's best strikers were childhood immigrants from Poland, and the Australian team was strengthened by a string cohort of Croatian immigrants.

Mauro Comanaresi, the Italian mid-fielder, was born in Argentina, and Brazilian-born Deco plays for Portugal, and France's David Trezeguet was born in France, son of an Argentine father who came to France to play professional soccer, but returned to Argentina at the age of 2 and now plays for the French team.

Right-wing politicians like Jean-Marie le Pen of France's Front National complain, as he did when France won the Cup eight years ago, that the largely black and Arab French team does not reflect France, and Germany's National Party has been handing out flyers that said "White should not just be the color of the shirts."

But they have made little traction. France is thrilling again to its multi-ethnic team, and for those who fret over a clash of civilizations, tens of millions of Arab and African viewers now seem to have adopted the French side as their own, led by the aging North African captain Zinedine Zidane, playing in his final games and scoring the penalty that put France into the final.

In this final week of World Cup passions as an estimated 2 billion people wait to watch Sunday's final, even the Almighty has been involved. It was bad enough for the Christians, with Pope Benedict XIV being German, but living in Italy, he was torn in anguish as the countries battled it out for a place in the finals.

Before the match, his personal secretary Father George Gaenswein told Vatican radio "The Holy Father is always impartial and so he will be tonight. His heart will be with Germany and Italy."

History does not record whether the Pope cheered or mourned when the Italians scored two stunning goals in the last minute of extra time to expel the German hosts of the competition. But we know that when Germany played Argentina in the quarter-finals, and the match went for 90 minutes without a score, and then for another 30 minutes of extra time still with no score, and it had to be decided on a penalty shoot-out, the Holy Father delayed his dinner.

But for Muslims, the confusion has been cruel. In the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the guards video-taped the three Saudi Arabian games and used them as rewards for well-behaved prisoners. Since the Saudis lost two and drew one, soccer fans might count it as cruel and unusual punishment.

But if most devout Muslims gathered around their TV screens to watch the World Cup, including the Saudi royal family and the Ayatollahs of Tehran, some hardliners counted it a mortal sin.

Islamist militia in Somalia opened fire on a crowd of teenagers who refused to leave a cinema that was screening the Italy-Germany game, an event banned by the fundamentalist Islamic militia chiefs. The independent local Shabelle Radio claimed that 2 people, the cinema owner and a girl, were shot dead.

Jock Steen, the legendary Scot who managed the great Liverpool team once observed "Some people say the football is a matter of life and death -- they're wrong. It's much more important that that."

That is a tragic coda to a fine World Cup, one of those rare events that reminds most of the human race just how much we really have in common, even if "Old Europe" can still show Donald Rumsfeld a trick or two.

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