While expected, defeat did not detract from earlier dramatics.
They have been widely praised for their seemingly indomitable high spirits (amid expected defeat on the playing field) and sense of fair play.
Liberals, facing an expected defeat by the moderate Islamist party Ennahda, charge that it has leapt ahead with financial support from Persian Gulf allies.
On the evidence, the Guardian's Rob Booth is right to suggest it was intended to be an obituary after Cameron's expected defeat.
It is presumably just coincidence that a victory for the rockers would deprive Mr Portillo, who has turned having once been gay into a public political odyssey, of the leadership after the expected defeat.
He spent one day on the Gujarat hustings - in his usual style of flitting in and out of political events that does his reputation no favours, though his minimalist role suited the Congress Party's wish to shield him from any blame for Congress's expected defeat.
In it, the conservative writer David Frum told me that he expected defeat to do to Republicans what it did to Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s: they would purify the party further, go back to basic beliefs, dig in their ideological heels, and hope that the public would decide to follow them.
The Senate delivered a sound, and expected, defeat Wednesday to a proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage, easily blocking a politically charged initiative that has been endorsed by President Bush and was a top priority of many of his socially conservative supporters.
Expecting defeat, but somehow clutching on to hope … Well, Frank [Skinner] and David [Baddiel] wrote that part of the lyrics, but the reason I got them in after the FA asked me to write a song was that I thought it was only worth making if it reflected how it feels to be a football fan.
