I happened to be looking through the server archives of ‘Grapevine’ chats in the office and I found this little prediction I made on June 5th. (Time is in GMT.)

Damn! Why didn’t I go to bet on this? I would probably have made some money there.

Anyway, looking at the way Russia gets its clocks cleaned, there’s some speculation that both Turkey and Russia are out because of some match fixing.

After all… it would be a little hard on bookies to come up with the payout odds for Turkey to meet Russia in the finals. Too much uncertainty, and too hard to predict who will win.

And well, considering that if I was the bookie and I won’t leave that much to chance… such speculation is not hard to imagine.