World Cup in the Midst of Euro 2008

Please for­give my delayed begin­ning to writ­ing on this page. My inten­tion is to write from home, but acquir­ing inter­net ser­vice is prov­ing to be a tough chore.  I’ll pen my first col­umn from work here at my own peril.  Such is the love for the game.

 With Euro 2008 only a few weeks away the whole Foot­balling world will focus on Europe and the sin­gle great­est con­fed­er­a­tion spe­cific tour­na­ment.  Through­out the month of June very lit­tle atten­tion from the casual Foot­balling fan­base at large will be paid to the rig­or­ously long process of the 2010 World Cup Qual­i­fi­ca­tion.  I per­son­ally believe that to be a great qual­ity of the World Cup and its qual­i­fiers.  With the com­plete tour­na­ment in mind (qual­i­fiers to the finals) the World Cup tran­scends and out­lasts all other inter­na­tional tour­na­ments as the main entree among tasty appetizers.  Sure the Euro­pean Cham­pi­onships only occur once every 4 years, as does the Olympics, but their scope and influ­ence reach only half or less as far as impli­ca­tions of any World Cup game.  With all that in per­spec­tive, I can now move for­ward know­ing that hope­fully all read­ers can share the same glimpse of immen­sity the World Cup, in all its stages, car­ries for me.

I often try to cap­ture that vast­ness by play­ing the tour­na­ment and its qual­i­fi­ca­tion stage out on the spe­cially released World Cup video games.  It’s easy for me to appre­ci­ate the long road a team such as Bermuda or Macau would endure to reach the World Cup sim­ply because I’ve sim­u­lated it through a game on XBox360 or on a PC.  While the emo­tion and atmos­phere falls con­sid­er­ably short, I can appre­ci­ate the qual­i­fi­ca­tion process a bit bet­ter through some basic trans­fer­ence.  Just that is enough to help me real­ize the mas­sive impli­ca­tions of the upcom­ing games for Bar­ba­dos against the United States, or for Belize with Mex­ico.  While in the grand scheme it’s only a minus­cule piece to the giant qual­i­fi­ca­tion puz­zle, it also hap­pens to be the grand­est of occa­sions for two coun­tries that have never known a World Cup from the pitch.  Which brings me to my first topic, not sur­pris­ingly about my home country:

 With the USA-Barbados game no more than a month away there has been talk that Bar­ba­dos could stack their team with some pro­fes­sional tal­ent.  There’s no secret to nat­u­ral­iz­ing play­ers any­more, the USA has been gain­ing for­eign tal­ent at the expense of other coun­tries (sorry Cuba, that was just ridicu­lous…) for a while with the promise of the Amer­i­can lifestyle in return for solid con­sis­tent World Cup Qual­i­fi­ca­tion per­for­mances.  Bar­ba­dos has the oppor­tu­nity to call any or all of 11 pro­fes­sion­als from the Eng­lish leagues for their home and away series, most notably big­man Mar­lon Hare­wood, who may be an after­thought in the EPL, but would be a dri­ving influ­ence in any CONCACAF qual­i­fi­ca­tion con­test regard­less of oppo­nent.  His size can only be matched by Oguchi Onyewu and even that would be a daunt­ing assign­ment.  USA need to be care­ful here, while it would be under­stand­able to expect the for­eign based play­ers to scoff at Bar­ba­dos’ invi­ta­tion, it could be poten­tially dis­as­trous should they decide to try their hand at the inter­na­tional game and suc­ceed against a far more expe­ri­enced power.  The real bur­den of proof is on USA, noth­ing less than 2 com­fort­able vic­to­ries will do in the eyes of the casual soc­cer fan in Amer­ica.  For those who may read my col­umn here, please beware, and offer a lit­tle slack, it’s quite pos­si­ble we’ll see a stut­ter­ing start, but there will be no excuse for los­ing.  I pre­dict the pos­si­bil­ity of a tie in Bar­ba­dos and a win Stateside. 

I’m the kind of spec­ta­tor who, when pre­sented with a neu­tral posi­tion, will side with the under­dog.  I grew up watch­ing over and over again the great­est movie I had ever seen: G’Ole, the 1982 World Cup.  I’ve since real­ized that the 1982 World Cup wasn’t nearly as excit­ing and dra­matic as the movie, and music, depicted it.  The movie itself I would say is the crown­ing achieve­ment of the World Cup Recap pro­duc­tion film genre, which might as well say its the clean­est piece of trash in the dump.  How­ever, as child and even now, I fell in love with the totally inept New Zealand squad that mag­i­cally found them­selves on the pitch along­side USSR, Scot­land, and Brazil for three resound­ing defeats.  New Zealand in 1982 to me exhibits the true char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the under­dog sur­prise qual­i­fier, of which there have been a few recently, but that moniker is quickly dis­ap­pear­ing.   The pos­si­bil­i­ties have run thin from Asia for the less tal­ented teams, and it’s vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to progress on con­tin­u­ous luck with­out good per­for­mances in any other region besides Ocea­nia.  The Oceanic Con­fed­er­a­tion is so small with the qual­i­fiers so sparsely sched­uled, that only a team from that region would really fit the descrip­tion of “sur­prise qual­i­fier” any­more.  I could make an argu­ment for Angola or Togo from the last Cup, or Trinidad and Tobago.  But they proved their worth over the course of a strong and dense qual­i­fy­ing cam­paign sched­ule.  My point is that while Ocea­nia could cry foul about FIFA reaf­firm­ing their 0.5 allo­ca­tion of places, they remain the only con­fed­er­a­tion with the abil­ity to pro­vide the last true under­dog to a tour­na­ment.  I’ll be watch­ing New Zealand closely in hopes that they find their way to South Africa with some luck and decent per­for­mances in the only 2 games that will mat­ter: the qual­i­fi­ca­tion legs against the 5th placed Asian team.

Finally, let’s come full cir­cle today and inves­ti­gate Europe again and the Euro­pean Draw.  Those of you read­ing should already know what it is, and if not, just to go FIFA.com to see the groups.  Eng­land are on the cruel end of a seri­ously hilar­i­ous prank by draw­ing Croa­tia again, but the World Cup is more seri­ous than Euro Qual­i­fi­ca­tion, I have to believe the play­ers approach it dif­fer­ently even though the sen­ti­ment from the fans car­ries the same weight.   I’m mostly a sup­porter of Wales (Ryan Giggs had the great­est influ­ence on me grow­ing up) and I see their draw to be very dif­fi­cult and prob­a­bly insur­mount­able con­sid­er­ing Russia’s resur­gence on the world stage.  I’m greatly intrigued by Groups 3 and 9 for dif­fer­ent rea­sons.  I’ve seen North­ern Ire­land win a num­ber of games that they nor­mally would have no busi­ness stay­ing com­pet­i­tive in and should they have the abil­ity to sneak past Poland and Slo­va­kia, they could be look­ing at a play­off place and a pos­si­ble spot in the finals.  They are to be con­sid­ered very care­fully by the East­ern Euro­pean teams or the con­se­quences could be dire, and Wind­sor Park is no fun for vis­it­ing nations.  Group 9 should offer tasty match-ups for the Dutch, Scot­land, and Nor­way to all beat each other to pulp and see who’s still stand­ing.  The Nether­lands aren’t par­tic­u­larly fan­tas­tic in qual­i­fi­ca­tion, and Scot­land has shown they can beat any­one, and no one should look past Nor­way for a moment.  There are no tier 4 teams, as I iden­tify them, in this group (I have my own 4 tier rat­ing sys­tem for Inter­na­tional teams) and I would expect Ice­land and Mace­do­nia to both steal wins at home against any­one, and it’s those results that will cause havoc in this group. 

Per­haps it’s too early for me to pre­dict all this, but then what are pre­dic­tions for?  I haven’t got­ten into the real cur­rent events and break­ing news yet, but I promise to find more rel­e­vant top­ics to address in the future.