Other Notes of the Morning
Watched the Croatia-Japan match. Zzzzzzzz. Really expected better out of Croatia after their good performance against Brazil a few days ago.
De Rossi is expected to be suspended for more than the automatic one match for his elbow against McBride. And apparently the Italian papers aren't happy with him. Recall that he ALSO took down a Ghanian player in the box in the first game - which (luckily for him) wasn't called.
It was interesting to see that the British are also unhappy with their annoucers:
I haven't said too much about out announcers because, while they are annoying, I just can't get too worked up about it. I don't understand what anybody at ESPN/ABC see in Marcelo, but whatever. I actually like some of the people who are routinely criticized - I like Julie Foudy, who I think is a better studio analyst than Wynalda and Lalas. Getting Chinaglia in there - with his pro-Italy bias - was fun. I thought at one point after Wynalda said someting snarky Chinagia might have got up and hit him. Awesome.
Brazil starting Ronaldo even after his "performance" against Croatia and the fact that he he went to the hospital complaining of "dizziness" earlier in the week. Interesting.
Regarding the tiebreaking rules for getting out of group stage: why isn't head-to-head one of the tiebreakers??? According to FIFA rules, after number of points, the next tie breaker is goal differential. Huh? So, if USA wins and CzechR ties Italy, it is then 4 points each. So the tiebreaker isn't Czech's head-to-head domination of the US? Wierd.
De Rossi is expected to be suspended for more than the automatic one match for his elbow against McBride. And apparently the Italian papers aren't happy with him. Recall that he ALSO took down a Ghanian player in the box in the first game - which (luckily for him) wasn't called.
It was interesting to see that the British are also unhappy with their annoucers:
THE BBC has been forced to ask its viewers to stop using “offensive abuse” after criticism of its World Cup commentators and pundits.
I haven't said too much about out announcers because, while they are annoying, I just can't get too worked up about it. I don't understand what anybody at ESPN/ABC see in Marcelo, but whatever. I actually like some of the people who are routinely criticized - I like Julie Foudy, who I think is a better studio analyst than Wynalda and Lalas. Getting Chinaglia in there - with his pro-Italy bias - was fun. I thought at one point after Wynalda said someting snarky Chinagia might have got up and hit him. Awesome.
Brazil starting Ronaldo even after his "performance" against Croatia and the fact that he he went to the hospital complaining of "dizziness" earlier in the week. Interesting.
Regarding the tiebreaking rules for getting out of group stage: why isn't head-to-head one of the tiebreakers??? According to FIFA rules, after number of points, the next tie breaker is goal differential. Huh? So, if USA wins and CzechR ties Italy, it is then 4 points each. So the tiebreaker isn't Czech's head-to-head domination of the US? Wierd.
posted by Al at 11:27 AM
5 Comments:
al, a generally well-informed friend with whom i watched portugal-iran yesterday said that head-to-head was a tiebreaker. sadly, i don't feel like paging through the 60 pages you linked us to! what page are the tie-breaking rules on?
Howard - it is article 31-5 of the FIFA rules, on pages 40-41.
"The ranking of each team in each group will be determined as
follows:
a) greatest number of points obtained in all group matches;
b) goal difference in all group matches;
c) greatest number of goals scored in all group matches."
One other thing I found interesting on page 40. On dividing the teams into groups:
"The Organising Committee for the FIFA World Cup™ will divide the
teams into groups by seeding and drawing lots in public, whilst taking sports, geographic and economic factors into consideration, as far as possible."
What?!
Is this why they do the group draw by the asinine method of by federation? (I don't understand why they just don't seed all the teams - at least into four groups - so you don't have a Group of Death. But anyway...
that is weird, or wierd, however you want to spell it!
Advancement scenarios
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