2012 Olympics: Spain Eliminated After 1-0 Loss

The second half was marked by some hilarious timewasting on Honduras’s part, which annoyed Spain to the point that some players lost their cool. Athletic Bilbao’s Iker Muniain almost resorted to blows after taking offence to Mendoza lying on the ground with a pretend injury (there were lots of these), but the passion the Spanish were clearly feeling didn’t translate to results. They’ll be going home after Wednesday’s matches.

The United Arab Emirates gave Uruguay a scare in their opening Olympic match, and things were no different against Great Britain. The hosts began the match in complete control and went 1-0 up a quarter hour in, but ended up pegged back and facing an embarrassing draw before a pair of late goals saw them through.

It didn’t look as though the miss was going to be a problem, but the UAE got back into the game totally against the run of play via Rashed Eisa and some hilariously poor defending in front of Jack Butland. Seriously, this has to be seen to be believed:

Konate broke the deadlock in the tenth minute, putting home the rebound after the unfortunate Martin Campana had saved superbly from Cheikhou Kouyate, and he made it 2-0 before the stroke of half time, nodding home a corner. In between was plenty of action, with Abdoulaye Ba shown a yellow card and then a straight red for two fouls on Luis Suarez within four minutes, Edinson Cavani seeing a shot spectacularly tipped away by Ousame Meme and Gaston Ramirez both hitting the crossbar then pulling off an appalling close-range miss.

Brazil looked a bit shaky yet again on Sunday, but found a way to squeak out a win again, locking up their place in the quarterfinals. They followed up their 3-2 win over Egypt with a game that was even more of a nailbiter, but Neymar pulled out some heroics to guide Brazil to a 3-1 victory over Belarus.

Belarus continued to play well throughout the first half, but Brazil began to take over in the second half. It took until the 65th minute for them to take the lead, but they did it on an absolutely stunning goal. Neymar was the scorer, hitting a perfectly curled free kick from 30 yards out into the side netting, past Aleksandr Gutor at his far post.

TV Schedule (all times ET)

All games are streaming live on NBCOlympics.com.