I missed the game and was shocked when I came home with 15 minutes to go and saw the scoreline Serbia 1 - 0 Germany.

What in Gods name did Serbia do that was so different to what Australia did? How did they make the scoreline so different??

I can't believe for a second that Serbia and Ghana are THAT far ahead of Australia in terms of skillful players. There must have been a tactics mistake on our part, surely. I don't think Cahill being our lone striker is a good enough explanation for our lack of success.

Discuss... please... and find an explanation for this so I can put my mind at ease.

They managed to get germany down to 10 men ;)

Australia fell to ten men and serbia didn't. Also helped they played an attacker up front ;)

to be honest, serbia didn't do to much different from their first game and they chose to not let germany control them the whole game.

It helped Germany had a lame arse penalty attempt...What was Vidic doing?

They sat deep and set up so that they had the same number of midfielders as Germany. In other words they did exactly the opposite of Australia's tactics.

They closed down Ozil.

I thought Serbia looked a little like Australia against Holland completly useless upfront but were compact in defense and made it difficult to break down. They also rode there luck a little as you do when you defend for 80 percent of the game. It appears this works against Germany and Pim is an idiot.

they flooded the midfield and kept a low defensive line, playing on the counter. as opposed to us, who, for some ridiculous reason, played a high line hoping for the offside trap - with the slowest back line at the cup - which is also counter-intuitive to playing on the counter since its hard to draw the opponent into your half when you're pushed so far up. this match was just further vindication of pim's lunacy.