RomanusOjinta wrote:
Amidst the cheer, I just want to point out that this is how Europe keeps winning world cups. Even in this tournament which was wide open, England still made it to the final 4 because they had an extremly easy draw. They had this draw because the FIFA ranking system determined that their matches against the footballing powerhouses of Andorra, Finland, Kazakhstan and Faroe Islands deserved more weighting than matches against each other between Zambia, Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Morocco and Nigeria.
As a result of this faulty weighting, England got into Pot B as a 2nd seed and ended up with only effectively one dicey game in the group stage (Tunisia). They were always going to beat Panama, so a win against Tunisa and the Belgium result wouldn't matter. They even visibly conserved energy in that game. Meanwhile Morocco found themselves with Portugal, Iran and Spain, i.e one tough but winnable game and two world cup finals in the GROUP STAGE.
Morocco would have easily given this England team more of an examination than either Colombia or Sweden did in the last 2 rounds, but we'll never know because after this weird and arbitrary ranking process, England got to go through despite having no discernible tactic except loading the box for set pieces, and Morocco went home.
I don't say this lightly: This is how to fix a tournament to achieve a desired outcome. Every African team that plays in the world cup is effectively playing against a stacked deck. Something needs to be done about the weighting given to European friendlies and qualifiers. There is nothing you can tell me that will convince me that a 5-1 stroll against Northern Ireland at Wembley is deserving of more points than a 2-1 away victory in Ndola against Zambia. A lot of CAF teams are weak, that is true, but there are easily more than 10 competitive teams at any point in time - Ghana, Nigeria, CIV, Senegal, Cameroon, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Gabon, Zambia, DR Congo, even South Africa.
Not every team in Europe is Italy or Holland or Germany. There are also a lot of Macedonias, Latvias and Montenegros that are not better than our Nigers, Libyas and Central African Republics. It is not fair that those games should get significantly higher weightings than ours, which distorts the rankings and allows trash like Poland and Iceland to be in the world's top 20 while Nigeria is outside the top 40.
Rant over.
While there are some points on FIFA rankings and even FIFA talked about this, many of the African teams failed. First of all look at us. We won against Iceland but still gave up a penalty, shot ourselves in the foot against Croatia and failed to capitalize and get a result against Argentina. You can argue about the penalty call but Ighalo should have put his chance in the net.
Egypt failed to get a single point this world cup, embarrassingly losing to SAUDI ARABIA, and they are supposed to be one of the top teams in Africa?
Senegal despite some good performances looked suspect defensively and relied too much on pace and power and lacked creativity. If they were able to close out a game they could have made it to the round of 16.
Tunisia while failing due to being in a tough group also lacked the ability to close out their game against England and we want to laugh at England for making a Semi final that no one expected them to make????
Morocco while unlucky and unfairly judged lacked cutting edge and that hurt them against Iran and Portugal.
We want to laugh at countries that do better than us and complain about FIFA ranking but it's time our FAs look at ourselves in the mirror and realize that we need to improve our football if we are going to actually do something in international tournaments. We were doing just as bad when the seedings were regional.
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