Nick Miller

He scores a hat-trick against Uzbekistan.

You know, we look slightly silly.

I'm not sure whether, you know, him scoring a hat-trick against one of the lower-ranked teams in the tournament is going to be like, ah, Ronaldo...

answers his critics that tells you it's a screw you know Rosa Ronaldo but that would to whatever degree justify Martinez's faith in him and then you know he goes from there and maybe scores against Colombia and everyone who's written these articles and given these opinions looks pretty silly.

I am actually going to witness Ronaldo try and score against Uzbekistan tomorrow.

I'm stationed in Houston for most of the tournament, so I'll be covering all the games here.

Portugal against Uzbekistan tomorrow, and then the one I'm actually really looking forward to is Cape Verde against Saudi Arabia on Friday.

which at the start of the tournament, because I was in Cape Verde when they qualified the game that they won to go through to their first World Cup back in October, I think it was.

And it was one of the most joyous experiences of my career.

It was absolutely wonderful.

And I kind of thought, you know, final game of the group, then, you know, these two, presumably at that stage, these two teams will have lost to Spain and Uruguay.

So this will be a bit of a shootout to see who can maybe sneak in as one of the third place teams

third place qualifiers for the knockout rounds.

But at The Athletic, we have an algorithm, I suppose, that is calculated how likely it is that every team will qualify from the group.

I'm addicted to that right now.

Yeah, and at the moment, as things stand, Cape Verdes are more likely to qualify than Uruguay, which is just absolutely astonishing.

So, yeah, I'm going to be at that game and I've been looking forward to that for months.

So I'm even more excited about that now.

How are you?

How have you been?