by Our Sports Desk

GERMANY provided a dominating reminder of why they are deemed the favourites at the Women’s World Cup by beating Sweden 4-1 on Saturday to progress to the quarterfinals.

Celia Sasic scored twice and Anja Mittag added a goal for the Germans in the round-of-16 game.

Disappointing as the finish was for Sweden, which ended the tournament without a victory, manager Pia Sundhage acknowledged it was going to take a near-perfect effort to beat Germany.

“Germany is a very good team and they deserve to advance,” Sundhage said. “We fought and we tried but it was not good enough.”

Mittag opened the scoring in the 24th minute and then Sasic scored the next two — including a penalty — in taking Germany to a 3-0 lead by the 78th minute.

The Swedes finally countered with Linda Sembrant scoring a header off Therese Sjogran’s free kick in the 82nd minute.

Sweden nearly cut the margin to 3-2 a minute later, when Sofia Jakobsson broke through but was stopped by goalkeeper Nadine Angerer.

Dzsenifer Marozsan then sealed the win by scoring in the 88th minute.

Sweden had the misfortune of opening the tournament in the so-called Group of Death, alongside the United States, Australia and Nigeria. After three ties and a third-place finish, the Swedes then had to play in their third time zone in two weeks and face Germany with only three days’ rest.

Aware of how tired the Swedes might be, Germany manager Silvia Neid said the plan was to apply the pressure from the opening minute.

“We couldn’t go into this match in a let’s-wait-and-see-what-happens attitude,” Neid said. “We wanted to deny them the feeling that it would be simple to play against Germany.”