I don't know. Maybe Barca fans are just used to this sort of thing, week in week out. On this sort of showing, though, there surely can be no stopping them in the final of the World Club Cup on Sunday and, as I said below, Inter must be absolutely cacking themselves at the thought if having to line up against this lot in just three days time. Not, of course, that you'd have had the slightest inkling of any of this if you'd just got to the stadium in time for Frank Rijkaard's post-match press conference. Now, here's a man that talks a lot, and says very little. Here's a couple of sample comments for you: "Our changing room is filled with positive energy and everyone is working towards the same goal". "We have a disadvantage in the final through Inter having been out here longer than us". "We are not afraid of anyone, but Inter come from the country where football was born". You'd think that his team had just scrambled a goalless draw on a wet Sunday night in La Coruna rather than that his team had just utterly outplayed the opposition in the semi-finals of the World Club Championship. Truly, he is a master of understatement.

Let's take a look at those three quotes again. Maybe something was lost in the translation, but all of them, I think, deserve closer inspection. "Our changing room is filled with positive energy and everyone is working towards the same goal". Well, one would hope so. If you can't be positive after a 4-0 win in a cup semi-final, when can you be? The same goes for "working towards the same goal". I'm struggling to see what alternative there could be, here, unless Deco and Ronaldinho are in direct competition to see who can pull off the most outrageous piece of skill ever seen on a football pitch. "We are not afraid of anyone, but Inter come from the country where football was born". Well, for one thing, I would take issue with Brazil being the country of football's birth, obviously (point taken, Frankie, but the game was well into its adolescence before the Brazilians got completely involved), but also... "not afraid"? Really? A wealth of talent that borders on the obscene, and they're not afraid of anyone? I'd sack their psychologist if they were. Finally: "We have a disadvantage in the final through Inter having been out here longer than us". Ah, the old favourite. Making out that the other team have an enormous advantage because they've been here for forty-eight hours longer than you. An almost Ronaldinho-esque body swerve there from Frank. If they lose on Sunday... it's all the fault of jet lag! We were tired! Well, I'm not buying that. Not that I think that such an excuse will be necessary. Inter looked out of sorts last night, and I'd be unsurprised if Barca did the sort of damage to them that they did to Club America this evening.

Of course, football being football, this could all come back to bite me on the backside on Sunday night. Barca's players could all fall asleep on the pitch here through jet lag, allowing Inter a chance to at least take the match to extra-time. On the basis of what I've seen so far, though, the others should make the most of the free time between now and the final, because Sunday night seems likely to be the Ronaldinho and Deco Show.

The competition proper starts today. I'll kick off by apologising for the lack of activity on here yesterday, but the jet lag hit me like a tidal wave, and I was unable to function for most of the day. Today, however, I'm fully recovered and able to post. again, I'm at The Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, and later on I'll be posting up my thoughts on this evening's semi-final between Ahly SC and SC Internacional later on. It is, I have to say, the match that I've been looking forward to the most. Two open, attacking sides, each with plenty of flair players. It promises to be a most absorbing evening.

With two semi-finals coming up, you might be forgiven for thinking that we're approaching some sort of climax here in Japan, but the truth of the matter is that things are only just warming up. With the fifth/sixth and third/fourth place play-offs to follow, we're not even a third of the way through the entire schedule and, in saying this, I'm hitting at the key issue in problems that FIFA have had with the selling of this tournament. At the moment, the World Club Cup is suffering from an image problem. It's kind of understandable, given that none of our teams are taking place, but the silence over this competition from the English press is deafening. The fact of the matter is that the World Club Cup is currently neither fish nor fowl. The set up, with six teams - one from each of the FIFA confederations - taking part is unsatisfactory. But I'm not here to be cynical. As I know that Sepp Blatter religiously reads this blog (who else could all those hits from Geneva be coming from?), I'm going to offer some of my patented brilliant advice on how to make the World Club Cup work.

Now, I don't think that I have to argue that football needs a World Club Championship. It needs it because there is a lot of fantastic football in the world. Europe may think it's the best, and it's certainly (in terms of revenue, if nothing else) the biggest, but that's not really enough, is it? I couldn't give two damns for these lists which show what clubs bring in the most money each year, and how much their overall turnover is. If this is all that matters, they might as well dispense with the football altogether, open up department stores and we can replace the league tables with the FTSE 100 Share Index. Where it counts is on the pitch. Football is a global game, and it needs a global tournament. We have the World Cup, of course, but most of us put our allegiance to our club team before our allegiance to our national team. Our club team is the bread and butter of our existence. We should have a global club tournament so that we can say with a degree of authority who is the best. We don't have that at the moment, because the tournament in it's current format doesn't carry the required weight. If Barcelona lose against Ahly SC or in the final, it won't be the end of their world. They'll return to Catalunya and resume their battle to become the champions of Europe again. The big European clubs have had a fairly dismal record in this competition since it started, so it needs to be changed to bring them onside.

The ideal World Club Cup needs to be played in the summer. There are, it seems to me, tournaments every summer at the moment, but there are still spaces in the calendar which it can be played. If we take it as read that the three big international competitions are the World Cup, the European Championships and the Copa America, then there is a spare summer that can be used. The tournament needs to be bigger. Sixteen teams should be sufficient - five from Europe, four from South America, two from Central and North America, two from Africa, two from Asia and one from Oceania. The tournament should be rotated around the world, rather than kept in one country. Much as I like Japan (and they are doing an excellent job of hosting this tournament), it makes sense for it to be played at times that are convenient for European television audiences. FIFA may need to take a small loss on it for a while too, in order to ensure that the potential earnings from it for the competing teams is high enough for them to sit up and take an interest.

There is no reason why this can't be a success. The world's appetite for football is insatiable. To say that the introduction of a World Club Cup is over-saturation is, frankly, hogwash - the sort put forward by big European clubs who want the Champions League to be the be-all-and-end-all, because they're in prime place at the trough at that tournament. I don't care about them. I want these so-called "big" European clubs to stand up and be counted. I want them to come to tournaments like this one and perform. Being the best in the world should matter them, because it sure as hell matters to the Brazilians - something which is borne out by the previous results on this tournament.

For now, though, we have what we have, and it's great. Of course it is. Whether it's Internacional fans singing themselves hoarse at Schiphol Airport a full five days before their team was due to be involved at all, or Club America's Rojas using a part of his anatomy to score a goal which most coaches and players use merely to speak out of - and I can't help but think that the tournament will start to heat up now. The cynics are missing out.