The USA is now second in our group, having won a really remarkable match against Costa Rica in a fucking blizzard* on Friday. Tonight is a huge match away against Mexico. I think we’ve never beaten them in Mexico City in a competitive match.
The Mexicans are busy filling up their urine-bags as I type this.
Some surprising results elsewhere, England 1-1 Montenegro and Argentina 1-1 Bolivia.
Also, Kazakhstan scored a goal on Germany after possibly the dumbest play in the history of ever by Manuel Neuer, whose love of casually dicking around with the ball finally bit him in the ass when he let it get too far away and the nearest Kazakh player booted it into the back of the net. Moron.
The game’s not until 8:30pm local too, that’s a lot of urine bags.
Montenegro was leading the group and played at home… hardly a ‘surprise’. The result of the day is Spain winning in France… without that goal they would most likely have ended up in the play offs.
I didn’t see the game, but it ended in a 0-0 tie. The U.S. gets 1 point, and moves to third in the group, which I take to be a good thing? What else needs to happen for them to earn a spot in the World Cup?
16 points is about what you need to qualify, so 12 more points in seven games. Home wins over Jamaica, Honduras, and Panama, and one away win over any of those three (or Costa Rica) should do it.
The top three teams of the six qualify, and the fourth plays a play-in match against New Zealand. Still a long way to go - this won’t be over until October.
Do the traditional power teams like Germany and Italy have to go through this qualifying stage, or do they just automatically get in?
The only team that automatically gets in is the host country (Brazil in 2014). European and South Americans have to qualify as well, but for as much as they bitch about how easy it is to qualify from CONCACAF (North and Central America), they have it just as easy.
FIFA: “So you beat the Faroe Islands and the Vatican? Well, you’re in then!”
Well, probably one US(ish) level team, or better, from UEFA misses out on the WC ever other tournament or so, so they do have a tougher route. The Netherlands missed out in 2002 I believe. It’s not nearly as bad as those fans would make it out to be, but still fairly bad. I personally think CONCACAF should have 2.5 slots instead of 3.5, but perhaps FIFA thinks more geographic diversity is more important than trying to have the 32 best teams.
I know you are exaggerating deliberately, but looking at the European Qualifying Groups, I wouldn’t say anyone has an easy ride. Don’t forget that to qualify from those groups automatically, you need to come first - the 8 best runners-up (out of 9) then play off for the remaining 4 places. So one team will go out of the competition despite being runners up in their group. I would say only group E looks particularly weak, but that means no-one is running away with it in that group and it looks like a possible candidate for giving us the unlucky runner-up (seeing as the top teams seem to be failing to maximise their points against the weaker teams).
Group I guarantees that one of Spain or France will not automatically qualify and the play-offs are always a bit of a lottery - although they are played over two legs (home and away), you only need one poor performance in the home leg and you’re struggling. In group F, Portugal are making heavy weather of it and there are some good teams competing for second place in groups B, C, and D. Group A is wide open in terms of first place. I can’t comment on how easy (or otherwise) it is to qualify from other continents as I don’t know enough about the particpants, but I certainly don’t think it’s “easy” to qualify from Europe.
I can’t say I was that impressed with the US’s play in that match. The defense held strong for the most part, but at times it looked like a squad of Jerry Lewis’s back there. Beasley was fucking up hard for most of the first half - though he did gut out some hard knocks and played reasonably well in the second.
But my biggest problem - an ongoing thing with this team - is their lack of attack. I think I counted maybe 5 or 6 times in the entire match where someone tried to make a move past a defender rather than passing it back to set something up. And the few times where they pulled it off, they looked fantastic.
But I just hate it when I see a player get the ball, with acres of space on either side with a defender yards in front of him, and he stops, turns and passes back. Eddie Johnson was the only brave one out there, and I’d say he gave a few Mexican defenders pause.
Then again … thanks ref, for not awarding that obvious penalty.
Well, maybe by objective standards, it was a penalty, but that’s exactly how Mexico was tackling all game long, with almost no whistles (as you noted, we could just ask Beasley about whether rough tackles were being called).
I’ll take your bait. What you say is untrue.
Here is the rankings that UEFA used to seed the different groups for World Cup Qualifiers. 13 of these 53 countries are going to Brazil. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that the nine teams out of pot #1 plus four out of pot #2 go - that’s pretty much what usually happens, or maybe the odd team from pot #3 does well and maybe some team from pot #1 fails. That leaves out a bunch of countries that might not be traditional power houses but that would have an easy time beating a good number of the non-European and non-South-American countries that do get in. It usually means that they’re doing poorly (Turkey, for instance, is failing spectacularly at the moment as compared to previous years, as is for instance the Czech Republic) but those are still teams with a good number of big names that would easily qualify if they were in CONCACAF or whatever the Asian federation is. Shit, at the moment, Portugal might not even make the playoffs.
At the same time there’s some teams that have it far easier. To make the obvious comparison, the US have it far easier than the European teams. Given, for instance, how many players on the US teams do well in big leagues in Europe and play for teams that do well in the Champions League or the Europa League, I’d guess that in a good year, the US would be in pot 2, in a bad year, they’d be in pot 3. Assuming that this is true, and that about half of pot 2 make it, and that about 15% of pot three make it, and that good and bad years are equally divided, that means the US playing in UEFA qualifiers would make it to about 1 in 3 World Cup final rounds. Maybe I am being very ungenerous, and it should be 1 in 2, or 2 in 3, or 3 in 4. That doesn’t matter: as it stands, the US have been in EVERY World Cup final round since 1990. Over that period, that is a better record than England have, a better record than France have, a better record than Portugal have, and a better record than The Netherlands have. Clearly, the ease with which Team USA makes it to the final round overstates their qualities - something underscored by the fact that at the final rounds, the US generally don’t do too well - at least not as well as one might expect of a team with their qualifying record.
So yeah, European qualifiers are way harder to get through than most others, and the US are an example of a country that benefit from being in a comparatively easy federation. While it would make the World Cup less diverse and less interesting, if we strictly went by quality UEFA would get a bunch more spots.
They were very lucky to get out with one point. 4 out of 5 times a player is fouled in the box like Mexico was in the final minutes it would result in a PK.
Forgive me but I have to laugh at this. Besides Germany and Spain, the other Euro countries arent any better than the USA or Mexico and the mid-level teams are also pretty good…look how many of their players play in Europe. The Euros wouldnt like it if there was global, as opposed to regional, WC qualifying. BTW, Holland should have missed out on Euro 2012 too.
While ranking tables aren’t perfect the FIFAranks the US at 33 with 20 UEFA countries ahead of it. That’s a pretty big indicator that the US isn’t really the equal of the rest of the UEFA countries.
The FIFA rankings are a joke. The USA won their WC 2010 Group that had England in it. They beat Spain in the Confederations Cup. They have also beaten and drawn with Mexico at Azteca stadium in the last few months.
No one takes FIFA rankings as being authoritative…or seriously even.
England, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands are all quite a bit better than the US and a bit better than Mexico. There are probably 15 more teams that are the same level as the US/Mexico. It’s laughable to say that some of these teams miss out on the WC while the US and Mexico will never miss out on the WC?
Your point is so ludicrous that I can only assume you are making it to get a rise out of people. I’ll give you that the FIFA rankings are not the strongest (funny - this has often been something that Americans have needed to be convinced of, but that was when the US was fourth in those rankings). That said, you’re reasoning that basically only Germany and Spain (but not France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, or England) are better than the US is based on just a handful of games. This is specious reasoning - by the same token, I might list the latest US results (which include a tie against Canada, and a loss against Honduras) and come to a very different conclusion.
Games between European teams and Team USA are too infrequent (and often don’t matter enough because they’re friendlies and you can’t really base an analysis off of those results) to really compare the two. On the whole, though, the US has a losing record against most of the UEFA countries that the FIFA places above the US now. The Netherlands has beaten the US four times in four games, for instance.
I can’t really find a good list or just some win/loss statistics against European teams, but this page has some facts. England beat the US 7/10 times, Italy 7/11 times, and Germany only 6/10 times (not sure if the other games are ties or wins for the US).
In the World Cup, the US record has been a losing one: 17/29 games ended in defeat (cf. England 14/59, Portugal 8/23, The Netherlands 17/69, France 19/57, Italy 17/83). If you only look at the more recent tournaments, these numbers don’t really change. The reason for this discrepancy is that the US has a far easier time making it to the World Cup final round than most European countries do, because it has no serious opponents other than Mexico to fight over more than three spots.
A final way to compare teams is to look at the clubs they play for and the leagues they play in. Team USA has sporadically had players that did well for big teams in Europe. I suppose the most talented and successful player has been Donovan, but numerous other country sides can boast numerous players with resumes as impressive or more so than his. It’s just silly to suggest that the US is on par with Portugal, which can field Christiano Ronaldo, or with Sweden, who can field Zlatan Ibrahimovic, or France, that has Benzema and Ribery. When you look at the countries that do well in world cups, they all have a number of players that play for big teams that do really well in the Champions League. This goes for the European teams, this goes for the African teams, and until recently it went for Brazil and Argentina, but that seems to be changing as those leagues are expanding and growing. The number of US players that have appeared in the Champions League (let alone for teams that made it out of the group stage and played in the knock out rounds) is vanishingly small.
I’m not sure why I wrote this all out since the point **madsircool **is making is ridiculous and really merits any more than a :dubious: or a :smack:. Lest someone think he might be right, though, here goes