The Dream Team almost cacked it again. The Australian Boomers led the end of each of the first three quarters before the Americans realised "Oh hello, the game has started has it?" and scored 24 points to 12 in the final term. USA 89, Australia 79, the DT's now 2 -1. Read the USA Basketball report on the game.

Meanwhile, the New Zealand Tall Blacks, and don't you just love the imagination that goes into these Kiwi team names, upset Serbia and Montenegro 90-87 (Press Association report at FIBA.com). Puerto Rico only just scraped home in their men's basketball clash with Angola on Thursday to the tune of 83-80, while Spain's 71-63 win over Italy was lead story on TVE's Telediario on Thursday night. It really is fun following someone else's parochialism sometimes.

Spain defeated the Aussie Sharks 8-4 in a fiery men's water polo encounter. As fiery as water sports can be. Australia had the penalty count their way 9-1 and could do little with it. Take your pick of reports from the Barcelona daily El Periodico (in Spanish) and the report on the Australian Water Polo website.

Australia v India in men's hockey was another rematch of a fixture that I witnessed at Sydney 2000. That game was a draw, this time the Aussies won 4-3 with Michael Brennan scoring 35 seconds from full-time. Former Indian international Mervyn Fernandis wrote about the game for Rediff in his regular column entitled (and I am not making this up) "Dribble Scribble".

It was all a bit of an anticlimax at the Olympic Softball Stadium as China beat Taiwan 1-0, the only score of the game coming from a Taiwanese error in the fifth inning.

Oh, and Phelpsy got gold medal number four in the 200IM.

Finally, there's now exactly one month till the wheelchair rugby begins at the Paralympics.