USA victory over Japan descends into argument about Pearl Harbour

Some of the USA fans were far from gracious winners as 'Pearl Harbor' trended amongst American Twitter users last night

The US stunned Japan with their deadly finishing (GETTY)

USA beat Japan in the Women’s World Cup final.

It's been a fantastic tournament that has shown the game at its beautiful best.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that some US fans could do with a lesson in how to win gracefully after "Pearl Harbor" became one of the top Twitter trends as sports fans gloated that the game was revenge for the 1941 attack.

But it's not quite as simple as that.

It's not very hard for a phrase to start trending on Twitter. The company's bots that determine what appears in the trending bar search and respond to sudden spikes in popularity of terms, not the total number of times they have been used - otherwise all we'd ever see at the top of the trending bar is something to do with One Direction.

Topsy, the analytics tool, shows that "Pearl Harbor" was tweeted more than 50,000, but a quick glance down the list of tweets shows that a greater proportion of people seemed to be despairing that the phrase itself was trending - rather than joining in the xenophobic fun.

Here are just a handful of examples of the sanity:

And although this one was retweeted more than 10,000 times

suggesting the sentiment did find some level of support, on the whole Twitter wasn't quite the repository of stupidity it sometimes is.