Design your own World Cup

[NUFAN]

Some of the European nations such as England are just lucky that they have countries in their confederation performing if you are going to justify success that way Sledger. You could just as easily replace the word Ivory Coast with England in the sentence above. Its impossible to mount a case than South America and Europe are not the stronger areas, but it is unfair to just define how successful the other confederations are purely on winning the whole thing. For instance, North/Central America deserve some praise. Asia does not deserve any, but I'm going to say that Africa were not horrible. it was only Cameroon.

Just realized in my 6am not having slept post, I said all 4 teams had qualified, obviously Honduras didn't..

 

[sledger]

Some of the European nations such as England are just lucky that they have countries in their confederation performing if you are going to justify success that way Sledger. You could just as easily replace the word Ivory Coast with England in the sentence above. Its impossible to mount a case than South America and Europe are not the stronger areas, but it is unfair to just define how successful the other confederations are purely on winning the whole thing. For instance, North/Central America deserve some praise. Asia does not deserve any, but I'm going to say that Africa were not horrible. it was only Cameroon.

Just realized in my 6am not having slept post, I said all 4 teams had qualified, obviously Honduras didn't..

I'm not judging an entire confederation on whether they win the thing, I explicitly said this.

I made my judgement on what African teams have achieved at World Cups in the last twenty years, which is basically nothing. I'm of course aware that England as a team have not done particularly well, but that is totally irrelevant to the point I was making (i.e. that African teams on the whole have not really gone on to achieve what was hoped of them, and on the whole have been pretty disappointing).

 

[silentstriker]

I'm not judging an entire confederation on whether they win the thing, I explicitly said this.

I made my judgement on what African teams have achieved at World Cups in the last twenty years, which is basically nothing. I'm of course aware that England as a team have not done particularly well, but that is totally irrelevant to the point I was making (i.e. that African teams on the whole have not really gone on to achieve what was hoped of them, and on the whole have been pretty disappointing).

Couldn't you argue that the only difference is that England just gets hyped more and doesn't perform while the African teams don't get hyped and don't perform?

 

[watson]

Some of the European nations such as England are just lucky that they have countries in their confederation performing if you are going to justify success that way Sledger. You could just as easily replace the word Ivory Coast with England in the sentence above. Its impossible to mount a case than South America and Europe are not the stronger areas, but it is unfair to just define how successful the other confederations are purely on winning the whole thing. For instance, North/Central America deserve some praise. Asia does not deserve any, but I'm going to say that Africa were not horrible. it was only Cameroon.

Just realized in my 6am not having slept post, I said all 4 teams had qualified, obviously Honduras didn't..

You can't really compare England with African nations like the Ivory Coast because England normally do reasonably well in World Cup tournaments. I know that England didn't make it out of the Group Stage this year, but that's the first time since 1958. The norm is that England make the Quarterfinals or better, and this they've done on no less than 8 occasions.

The fact is, when you get down to the last 4 or even 8 teams in a World Cup it becomes a bit of a lottery because the teams are so close. Generally, an unfortunate injury, stupid referee decisions, or home-crowd support are all that separate the winner from the losers.

 

[NUFAN]

You can't really compare England with African nations like the Ivory Coast because England normally do reasonably well in World Cup tournaments. I know that England didn't make it out of the Group Stage this year, but that's the first time since 1958. The norm is that England make the Quarterfinals or better, and this they've done on no less than 8 occasions.

The fact is, when you get down to the last 4 or even 8 teams in a World Cup it becomes a bit of a lottery because the teams are so close. Generally, an unfortunate injury, stupid referee decisions, or home-crowd support are all that separate the winner from the losers.

In the World Cup I am designing, I CAN COMPARE WHOEVER I WANT. :P But yeah, fair call - I guess I made my comment as some of the comments were talking about having to win the whole thing to get credit, but Sledger has already explained its not what he meant. I just don't think Africa have been that bad (apart from Cameroon) and for a confederation so large, the number of countries they get at the Cup is about right IMO.

 

[FaaipDeOiad]

It is worth noting that 40% of the African teams made it out of the group stage in this World Cup, which is only slightly less than the 46% of European teams. I can't really argue that African teams have done particularly well at the World Cup overall but I think people tend to pass judgement on the confederation based on the performance of a couple of teams, which is a bit unfair. I mean, you could look at group C and argue that even highly fancied European teams did very poorly, but there's 11 other European teams and some of them are potential winners, so nobody is going to do that.

I think the reality is that teams from the lesser confederations have been highly inconsistent but their results have been generally improving, and more good players overall are coming out of Africa and Asia today than in the past. The worst teams at this World Cup seem better organised and more competitive to me than the worst teams were in say '98 or '02. I don't have stats for this but I'd also imagine there's more players from the lesser confederations playing top flight football in Europe than there were at that time. That indicates progress to me even if there's not a single African country anyone thinks is a serious contender to win the tournament.

 

[watson]

In the World Cup I am designing, I CAN COMPARE WHOEVER I WANT. :P But yeah, fair call - I guess I made my comment as some of the comments were talking about having to win the whole thing to get credit, but Sledger has already explained its not what he meant. I just don't think Africa have been that bad (apart from Cameroon) and for a confederation so large, the number of countries they get at the Cup is about right IMO.

I agree. You can't judge a whole continent by the performance of a single country like Cameroon. So overall, I think that the mix of countries is just about spot-on.

 

[Uppercut]

Problem is, for me, that this sort of thing has been happening for as long as I can remember. Cameroon are never not involved in some sort of scandal, Ivory Coast have repeatedly not performed, Ghana have done well on the whole but have arguably underperformed given the players at their disposal, Nigeria were emerging as dark horses/reasonable contenders about 20 years ago but until recently seemed to have spent all the time since the mid/late nineties regressing. Then we've had teams like Togo and Angola that were just hopelessly out of their depth.

You say this like the World Cup would somehow be better without a sub-Saharan African nation playing a phenomenally high-energy game before spectacularly imploding.

Just reading through the thread, I think there's a mistaken assumption that the team to miss out would be the worst of the qualifiers from that confederation, and that's not necessarily the case. The European team that came closest to going out was France, for CONCACAF it was Mexico, for South America it was Uruguay and from Africa, Algeria- all of them made the second round.

 

[Pothas]

Yeah that is a good point,

It is really quite ridiculous that Mexico almost failed to qualify given how they have played so far this tournament and how limited Honduras were,

 

[Uppercut]

Yeah replacing their manager made a massive difference. Pulled off a reverse-Moyes.

 

[GIMH]

Lowest paid manager at the WC as well. Is on roughly what Ronnie Moore was on in his 1st spell with us.

 

[sledger]

You say this like the World Cup would somehow be better without a sub-Saharan African nation playing a phenomenally high-energy game before spectacularly imploding.

Haha, not at all, this is one of the things I look forward to the most. It'd just be nice to come into the tournament actually really rating a team not from Europe or South America, and expecting them to do well for once.

 

[Pothas]

Japan really the biggest disappointment for me this time round, expected an awful lot more from them.

 

[Uppercut]

Lowest paid manager at the WC as well. Is on roughly what Ronnie Moore was on in his 1st spell with us.

And the two highest paid are Capello and Hodgson, who arguably did the two worst jobs in the tournament.

 

[Furball]

An African XI wouldn't get close to winning.

The best African team has been Algeria, which is no coincidence as their players are all French by birth and upbringing.

 

[Furball]

Japan really the biggest disappointment for me this time round, expected an awful lot more from them.

Yeah me too.

They've got the same failings as last time that the emergence of Kagawa sadly hasn't helped.

 

[NUFAN]

In my designed World Cup I would change the rule where players miss matches due to too many yellow cards in separate matches. Always hate seeing a first choice player miss a match because of that.

 

[GIMH]

But then what penalty is there for a player who makes key cynical fouls late in games?

 

[Furball]

In my designed World Cup I would change the rule where players miss matches due to too many yellow cards in separate matches. Always hate seeing a first choice player miss a match because of that.

Maybe they should learn to tackle.