Popworldcupjustice: Ghana vs USA

GHANA V USA

Guest referee: Chris Mandle — Freelance journ­al­ist

 Flavour — ‘Nwa Baby (Ashawo Remix)'

“'Hang on,' you say. 'Famed Singer Of Song Ariana Grande "going up" against Lesser Known Tune-Fiddler, Flavour? This is like [FAMOUSLY SKILLED FOOTBALL TEAM] Versus [NOTABLE SOCCER UNDERDOG] all over again!' According to the descrip­tion under­neath the Flavour video on Youtube, this song sees Flavour move away from his well-doc­u­mented, three-pronged approach to 'being a lad' – that's club scenes, women and alcohol to you and I – in order to try something different. But he spends most of the time standing on top of a rooftop honking around, cavorting about in a lift and sitting in his car, so it's not exactly a game changer is it. Anyway in much the same way people who sing 'baby' AREN'T ACTUALLY singing about a baby, 'Nwa' is used as a term of endear­ment instead of its literal meaning, which is 'child', so calm down everyone. Flavour appears to be ser­en­ad­ing his latest 'squeeze' (sample line: "I don hammer no be small/Now it’s time to chop money") and given this has 12m views on YouTube, he's obviously doing something right. Anyway let's look on the comments to see if we can glean any more from the song shall we? Glowsexy28 says: 'My life need some Flavour in IT! WINK! Mmmmmmm.' So there you go.”

 Ariana Grande feat Iggy Azalea — 'Problem'

“Meanwhile Ariana Grande and her good chum Iggy Azalea's song has been everyone's 'jam' for ages and has over 28m hits on popular time-wasting website YouTube. That's over 2.855 times as many views as Flavour's own video, which some people might find inter­est­ing. Anyway this song is a banger in every sense of the word. It's got a saxophone in it, proving without a doubt that the 'noisy pervert' of the woodwind world should exist only to be hoiked into pop songs; there's also a good whispery bit by an uncred­ited gentleman, and even the rap by 'Iggy Igg' is good. Also the general message of the song seems to be 'God you're a total bellend aren't you?', and there's something poetic about that."

Chris' full time score:

Ghana 1 — USA 4

Now you can vote for your own favourite.

Next up: Belgium vs Algeria

UPDATE: Apologies to Ghana but we mis­takenly used a video by Flavour to represent their country in our Popworldcupjustice thing, when Flavour's actually from Nigeria. Basically his video was on a website of the Top 10 biggest videos in Ghana and when we Googled to double-check his nation­al­ity a remix entitled 'Ghana' came up adding to the confusion. This same website tells us that this video below by Blaq Sam is currently Number One so we've pasted that below. To be honest it probably wouldn't have beaten the mighty Ariana anyway, but let's have a listen regard­less.