Lurker > charmander6000

End of an era...

The true story of Tetris is quite interesting...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8

What's wrong with the current system?

10 - Excellent
9 - Good
8 - Average
7 - Bad
6 - Bad
5 - Bad
4 - Bad
3 - Bad
2 - Bad
1 - Bad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa08Y-fhfTI

Gotta Catch em All

At what point will McCarthy drop out and let the other 200 members figure out a replacement?

Or what will it take to change the rules for plurality? Does it need to be unanimous or something because I don't think the Democrats will oppose it in the off-chance they get their speaker elected.

Bold Prediction: Triangle Strategy avoids finishing last.

I think it is very difficult to change nationality once you gain your first senior international cap.

Egypt qualified in 2018 and was favored to qualify again, but lost out against Senegal. They should have a good chance in 2026

Norway would need a favorable qualification group. Even with the expanded field, Europe has so few spots to compete

They had 6 groups of 4 back when the World Cup was 24 teams.

You're just begging for collusion if you do 16 groups of 3 where the two playing teams can conspire to eliminate the non-playing team.

XIII probably suffered from LFF if they included 13-2 and 13-3 as options

I wouldn't call Spain totally un-cookie, they were probably the best team to have never won the World Cup (or second to the Netherlands) from an historical sense.

Argentina with one foot into the final.

Morocco has lost a few of their key defensive players. I don't think they will survive the onslaught, especially if France scores early.

ctesjbuvf posted...

Belgium looks way better with both Croatia and Morocco in the semis imo

I was thinking the same with Canada :p

red_sox_777 posted...

Fun fact: Portugal and England have been formal allies since 1373.

Might be broken if Portugal beats them in the semis.

Croatia has a pretty good record at the World Cup when it comes to extra time/penalties.

Brazil better watch out

You still need two rest days so that Morocco and Portugal get three days off (or have each quarterfinal match as its own day)

Has a team ever gone 0/3 in penalties before?

If Morocco pulls this off, they must fancy their chances in the quarters. Besides Croatia, the Portugal/Switzerland winner is probably the best chance for an upset IMO.

red_sox_777 posted...

Morocco is the last team not from Europe or South America standing. It would really be something if 6 teams from the other continents made the round of 16 and none of them could get through one round of the knockout stage. I guess it would not be surprising, but still feels a bit weird for the other continents to be out just like that after having a very good group stage.

While the gap between Europe/South America and the rest of the world is narrowing they still haven't made the jump to the top tier. So while they could pull off an upset against the top teams every now and then, for them to string multiple upsets is still very difficult.

Yeah Mario Kart 64 had weight classes (light, middle, heavy), but even within the classes each character had subtle differences. IIRC from lightest to heaviest it went:

Toad > Peach > Yoshi >>> Mario > Luigi >>> Wario > Donkey Kong > Bowser

ctesjbuvf posted...

Holland less so, I admit, but that match also didn't feel as one-sided, USA just failed to score on some chances where they should have

To be fair, outside of Switzerland (and maybe Japan due to momentum) the United States was probably the strongest of the underdog teams for this round.

Number of teams remaining from each pot:

Pot 1: 6/8 (Eliminated: Belgium, Qatar)
Pot 2: 4/8 (Eliminated: Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Uruguay)
Pot 3: 5/8 (Eliminated: Iran, Serbia, Tunisia)
Pot 4: 1/8 (Eliminated: Cameroon, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Wales)

The third seeds actually have more remaining nations than the second seeds. The only fourth seed remaining is Australia

Assuming Cameroon doesn't sneak the last round of 16 spot the continental breakdown is:

Africa - 2/5
Asia - 3/6
CONCACAF - 1/4
Europe - 8/13
South America - 2/4

Uruguay needs to score to stay alive.

I mean given Brazil and Argentina's strength it's quite rare for them to be eliminated by non-European teams.

I guess it depends on your definition of lesser. For example, in the historical context of the World Cup I would call Belgium a lesser nation and Brazil lost to them in 2018, but as you already know that was during Belgium's golden generation. If we include golden generations then no Brazil hasn't been eliminated by a lesser nation.

malyg posted...

Brazil benefit a lot from this. They're struggled against the top European nations at world cups since winning their last one. If Argentina beat Netherlands they've got no top european teams until the final. Avoid England, France, Spain and Portugal (and obvs Italy and now Germany).

Assuming Brazil and Portugal win their groups tomorrow, I'd argue both halves are relatively equal in terms of strength.

Brazil - France
Argentina - England
Netherlands - Spain
Croatia - Portugal

Not too different

What a recovery after a 7-0 thumping from Costa Rica.

Japan just needs to hold in order to advance.

It's not so much about the round of 16 match (based on their play Croatia isn't that much better than Morocco), but rather the quarterfinals where finishing first likely leads to a match against Brazil while finishing second you'd get a much easier opponent.

shane15 posted...

Spain finishing second is like booking a semi final place. They win the group and they get Croatia followed by Brazil.

On paper throwing the match against Japan to take second seems like a good opportunity, but Germany is the type of team capable of running up the score and eliminating Spain.

LuisSera posted...

I considered that as well, but to be fair, if CONCACAF retain that many qualifying spots into the 2030 World Cup (and to a lesser extent the fact that over half of South America qualifies with 6 guaranteed slots), think just how hard it is for some of the bigger teams there to fail to qualify. That's almost as much of a sewn up qualification as New Zealand's is.

That happens in those big fish in a small pond continents. Even if Mexico/United States have a bad qualification period they still have a huge opportunity to qualify (which made USA's flop in 2018 all the more impressive). There isn't really a way to solve it other than combining all the continents into one big qualification format.

pezzicle posted...

3 team groups is def a bad idea

I think there will likely be 6 or 7 really poor sides in each tourny from here on out.

AFC and CONCACAF will have a pretty significant amount of teams now and there confederations aren't strong.

Yeah, AFC and CONCACAF really got an undeserving boost in teams. I really thought Europe would have gotten 6-7 teams to keep pace with their current make-up. Something like...

Host - 1
Africa - 8
Asia - 6.5
CONCACAF - 5.5 (2 would be subtracted and given to the hosts)
Europe - 19.5
Oceania - 1
South America - 6.5

Would make it a lot more competitive. I'm a bit on the fence about giving Oceania a full spot, but if we are going to keep them around they might as well get a full chance to be represented in a 48-team tournament.

voltch posted...

USA best NA team as expected!

Just wait until Costa Rica defeats Germany tomorrow.

Shattered posted...

It being decided by fair play points is a bit silly to me because not all referees are the same. Some will throw out cards far easier than others.

The old method was to flip a coin.

Once you are this far down the tie-breaking scenarios it's going to be quite arbitrary.

Who is winning in fair play points?

Thanks Seanchan

Tunisia is now ahead and could advance to the next round...

shane15 posted...

I've just been having another think about that 2026 format. The design is that bad we could end up with the best teams meeting each other in the last 16 simply because of how the draw went. In the current format if you win your group you're more than likely going to avoid a favourite until the quarter final at the earliest. With the new format all the top teams should win their group and avoid each other in the round of 32 but after that is when it turns into a free for all.

It's a bit of an issue. I think they should go the same route that the ATP/WTA Tours go in tennis for at least the Pot 1 teams. In that pot, the top 4 are randomized into separate quarters, teams ranked 5-8 are randomized so that they would face the top 4 in the quarterfinals (barring any upsets) and then the other 8 teams are randomly selected to lead the other groups.

XIII_Rocks posted...

This was mentioned as one smaller terrible part of Qatar hosting the tournament and it's come to fruition.

They had 12 years to pull every trick in the book to be not shit: infinite money, a world-class academy, world-class facilities, screwing with nationality rules and functionally bribing players with the allure of being a Qatari citizen and the associated benefits of that (free land, money, etc) to get them to play, and after all that... they're absolutely awful, the worst ever host nation and maybe the worst team to be in a world cup in the modern era.

Maybe next time don't sequester your entire squad in a training camp for 6 months with no real competitive football

What a fucking laughably pointless exercise.

Yeah, I thought after their Asian Cup win in 2019 they could maybe do something, but they never seem to have gain any momentum since then.

Speaking of which, because the groups will only have three teams, we can't have simultaneous matches. I wonder how long until we get a repeat of that 1982 match between Austria and West Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgrace_of_Gij%C3%B3n

Normally host nations tend to be good already so while they might not deserve the top seed it isn't completely misplaced. We got lucky that one of Netherlands/Germany was placed into Group A so there wasn't a huge imbalance, but it could have easily been someone like Switzerland/United States

Didn't realize that the first games begin an hour earlier, good thing I caught that before missing half a game.

I'd say they are more inconsistent. Japan and Saudi Arabia had good performances in the first round of the group stage while Australia and Iran had poor performances. Now that the second round is almost over the opposite is true.

Australia, Iran and Japan only need draws to advance to the round of 16. Easier said than done, but should they pull it off it would be the best performance ever from Asia (best ever was 2 teams in the round of 16 in 2002 and 2010).

That the punch line to the joke "Why did the chicken cross the road?" was actually about the chicken getting killed and getting to the other side was meant to be the afterlife.

What a choke by Japan, even if Germany loses today, I'd still rank them as favourites at finishing second.

Considering how poorly Belgium played against Canada, I'm not surprised they lost to Morocco. I'm still hoping for a result against Croatia, but now I'm not feeling so good about it.

I know, but it's hard to see Costa Rica win tomorrow, though I guess the possibilty is still there.

Do or die tomorrow for Germany against Spain

Probably same for Canada too.

Yeah, as soon as you realize Pokemon is a merchandise series rather than a video game series their business decisions make a lot more sense.

andylt posted...

I can't believe Pokemon still gets away with selling one game for the price of two, I wonder how many of these 10 mil were the same people buying both versions. Probs not a massive amount but it may be enough to make a dent on its 'all time record' standings.

Honestly, the two version system likely allowed my brother and I to have our own games. It would have probably been difficult to convince my parents back then to buy the same game twice.

barreldragon88 posted...

Also, I still want that goddamn Ice buff

Ice is super-effective against fire and water and also resists water.

You're welcome