Lionel Messi (File)

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Rob Houwing, Sport24 chief writer

Cape Town – First the bad news: the 2010 World Cup remains in danger of being one of the least productive from a goal-scoring point of view.

But a more chipper development is that the round of 16 - completed with Spain’s defeat of Portugal on Tuesday night - appears in broad terms to have represented some sort of awakening on the find-the-net front.

Fans will now pin their hopes on that situation blossoming further in some tasty quarter-finals, confirmed as Holland v Brazil and Ghana v Uruguay on Friday and Germany v Argentina and Spain v Paraguay a day later.

In the 56 matches played thus far, and with only eight left including the usually tepid playoff for third place, 123 goals have been registered, meaning an average of 2.19 per game.

As The Guardian online noted on Wednesday, that is still lower than any World Cup in history, with the Italian-staged event in 1990 – “considered a nadir by most people at the time” – averaging 2.21.

But the relatively lame scoring situation in South Africa is characterised mostly by low returns in the group phase, rather than the round of 16 which marks the first chapter in the straight knockout period and usually tends to be more cagey because of the increasingly high stakes.

This country has done well out of the round of 16, to the point that the knockout phase as a whole seems set to easily eclipse both the 2006 and 2002 World Cups.

A total of 22 goals were scored across the eight “last 16” matches: in Germany four years ago there were 26 in all 15 knockout matches (excluding the third-place affair), while in Japan/South Korea it was 25 from the 15.

The group stages in South Africa produced some slightly lopsided scoring occurrences.

Portugal, for instance, failed to score in two of their Group G games – goalless draws against Ivory Coast and Brazil – and also in their later elimination at the hands of Spain, but did bang seven past North Korea in a rare Cape Town spree.

Germany, in Group D, started like a house on fire with a 4-0 drubbing of Australia in Durban but then crashed 1-0 to Serbia and pipped Ghana 1-0 before returning to mass-scoring form in the round-of-16 grilling of England.

One characteristic the 2010 event has lacked so far is a ding-dong, “3-2” or “4-3” sort of match between relatively even-strength sides.

Nobody would complain if a quarter-final or two threw up such a state of affairs, although the chances probably get unlikelier as the grand climax looms …