Friday, October 14, 2011

France - get ready for another group of Death!

This is what happens when you cannot even get out of the group stages in major tournaments...your coefficient drops and you have less of chance of getting out of the group stages! Side note, this is something that will haunt nations like Belgium and their "golden generation," they have not even qualified for a major tournament since 2002 in South Korea/Japan. This means that in qualification groups they are seeded low, meaning get slotted into groups with at least 2 big fish. Making qualification more difficult, hurting the coefficient...and so forth. Their qualifying group for the World Cup 2014 is no cake walk...but back to Les Bleus.

Based on the coefficient, France might drop to the FOURTH pot! To explain, there will be 4 groups of 4 teams, and to determine this you have 4 pots of 4 teams. The first pot has the hosts - Ukraine and Poland - and then Spain and Holland. Pot 2 has Germany, Italy, England (which is comical but regularly getting to 1/4 finals has its perks!) and probably Russia (or Croatia if they get out of the play off). Pot 3 will have Greece, Denmark, Sweden and Croatia/Russia...leaving France in POT 4!!! With the likes of the other 3 winners of the play offs...so basically Les Bleus could find themselves in a group like this:

Spain, Germany, Croatia and France...yikes. Of course Les Bleus could also have a group of: Poland, Greece, Russia and France. Then again France "dodged"a bullet in South Africa when their #1 seed of their group were the hosts...and still could not get out of their own way.

Oh well. We shall see what the draw holds!

2 comments:

philip said...

I think Belgium has a really good chance to qualify. They really should of got 2nd in the euro 2012 qualification but gave away stupid point to azerbaijan and austria in the last minute.

Still think they are a long way from what they were in the 80s but with their squad it is possible

GFC said...

The Red Devils have a very solid team, lots of great youth coming through the ranks. I think the WC group they are in is tough but manageable, it would be great to see them make the tournament.