Yes we know, Brazil, the Nether­lands, Spain, Por­tu­gal and Italy are all teams tap­ping great­ness while Ger­many, France, Ar­genti­na and Eng­land are not far be­hind. !--break-->One of these teams will prob­a­bly lift the World Cup on Ju­ly 11 but there's al­ways the chance of a David com­ing along to slay one of the afore­men­tioned Go­liaths.

Ser­bia, Slo­va­kia, Slove­nia, Hon­duras, New Zealand and North Ko­rea will al­so be tak­ing the field in South Africa, as will Ghana, Ivory Coast, Aus­tralia and Cameroon. No­body can ar­gue that these teams are in the same class as the ones men­tioned above but in the un­pre­dictable game of foot­ball, things may very well get in­ter­est­ing over the next month. The tri­umph of the un­der­dog is one of the most cher­ished events in sport and his­to­ry is lit­tered with such in­stances that have flab­ber­gast­ed fans and left the op­pos­ing favourites stunned be­y­ong words.

One on­ly need look as far back as a week ago when the crick­et­ing min­nows Zim­bab­we beat the num­ber one ranked ODI team In­dia in two straight match­es be­fore whip­ping Sri Lan­ka in one.

Sri Lan­ka them­selves were long­shots at the 1996 World Cup which they even­tu­al­ly won, beat­ing the all con­quer­ing Aus­tralians in the fi­nal in what turned out to be the last time they failed to lift the tro­phy.

Back to foot­ball though, on­ly sev­en na­tions (Uruguay, Italy, Ger­many, Brazil, Eng­land, Ar­genti­na and France) have ever won the tour­na­ment over its 18 stag­ings which sug­gests that their isn't much room for a Cin­derel­la sto­ry mak­ing it all the way to the end, but keep your eyes on the un­der­dogs. There should be atleast a few sur­prise re­sults to dis­turb the mo­men­tum of the tour­na­ment enough to af­fect its fi­nal out­come