world cup thread

[Kevin]

Is it just me, or is this showing that the method of grouping and counting points for advancement is wrong? I would think the finals should have the best teams, right?

Jester touches on this in another post, but some of the issue is that perceptions of teams were incorrect and need to be adjusted.

There were some controversy about which teams made the tourney, but the process to get to the tourney requires all the teams (other than the host country) to make it through qualifying tournaments. It's very likely that you have the 25 best teams in the field of 32 and the 7 or so other teams that are good, but not necessarily the best 32.

This is no different than say the NCAA basketball tourney. You don't get the best 64 teams in that tourney and the "Final Four" is generally not the 4 best teams either, because it's single elimination and the best team doesn't always win a basketball game either.

No format is perfect, but honestly the World Cup isn't really any worse than other set-ups from what I've seen. I have post that that shows the teams based on FIFA rankings, I just checked and yeah, only 7 teams are not in the top 32, only 5 aren't ranked in the top 40.

Based on that, though we don't know what will happen with Spain of the 8 groups, 5 of them have advanced their top ranked team, that could be 6 of them. Sure 3 of them advanced their lowest ranked team as well, but in the case of Ghana, they aren't rate that much worse than the teams the advanced ahead of (32 on the FIFA rankings) they played better than Serbia and Australia, but it was a close thing for them. South Korea is likely under rated and the top team in that group was in no danger of not advance. SK outplayed Greece and Nigeria to advance. France played poorly but I've talked about that group, I was not surprised that they didn't advance.

So yes as I've said in other posts there have been upsets, but mostly it was France, which is less surprising than it seems, they had the best #3 team and a very good #2 team in their group and the host country. But the way they played they might have finished last in any of the groups. Italy seems to have had other issues. Other than that the upsets are likely more about perception of teams than anything else.

I think South Korea, Japan, and Australia are showing the Asia grouping isn't as weak as thought.

Besides I like seeing underdogs/Cinderellas with a chance. I think FIFA has done a pretty good job.