2010 Football World Cup Qualification

[maccatak11]

There is a replay on fox sports that starts at 8am tomorrow. Ill be sleeping tonight, and getting up early and starting the state finals morning in the best possible way, by hopefully watching an Aussie win.

[Ashley Higgins]

woo 0-1 15th min

haha great shot kewel

[bennymacca]

aussies just won 3-1

surely we are through to the next stage now, YAY

[pseft]

class goal from HK

[BigPete33]

Yep, we are through!

We have a home game against China still to play which is a dead rubber for us and the match between Iraq and Qatar will decide who finishes in 2nd place.

It will be interesting to see who we get drawn with in our final qualifying group. All we need to do is finish 2nd in that group of 5 to qualify for the World Cup itself. If we finish 3rd we still have a shot but we'd need to beat the other 3rd placed team from the other final group and then beat the winner of Oceania (which will extremely likely be New Zealand).

I really rate our chances as long as all of our best players make themselves available. If Viduka suddenly wants to play I'd tell him to get knotted though.

[BigPete33]

Found a rather interesting (and somewhat inspirational) article on fox sports news website about bidding for the 2018 World Cup.

Some of the numbers being thrown about are absolutely mind blowing.

Article can be found here.

[Finno]

^You posted that about two days too late. It would've really helped me write my feasibility analysis for my uni course.

Basically I concluded that while yes, it is feasbile provided we do some serious upgrades of our stadiums. We only have seven stadiums (not including AAMI stadium which, despite meeting the minimum seating requirements is a long way from ideal) barely meeting standard as outlined by FIFA. Only the MCG is capable of holding the opening match, semi finals and final as it stands now.

The article you linked claims a lot of facts. 3.2million spectators, 2.3million visitors etc. Germany however is at a geographical advantage where attending matches is not a huge trip for most Europeans. Australia will be very different, despite our success with the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

The World Cup will take four weeks to host, not including the four weeks the teams will require to train and prepare (and they wont be satisfied with anything less than premium grounds). This will happen smack in the middle of the AFL and Rugby seasons, and TV and stadium contracts will obviously have to be sorted.

However, the problem is that Sepp Blatter has stated already that he wants the World Cup to go back to Europe for 2018 (after tours in Sth Africa and Sth America) and England have put together a reasonable bid that will be difficult to ignore. Sure, we can bid, but it wont be successful.

[BigPete33]

ooo a sensible discussion!

Sepp Blatter did indeed mention that he wanted it to go to Europe, but as the article points out he said not much later that he thought we should bid. Frank Lowy also said that after much hob-nobbing he's absolutely convinced that we should bid. Good enough for me.

The TV audience will be huge, fullstop. Asian countries would be cheering their heads off that it's in a more suitable timezone for them than somewhere in Europe, and let's not forget what approximate percentage of viewers were from Asian countries. Also worth mentioning is that football fans WILL travel. The pound or the euro vs the $AU certainly won't be hurting our cause and as IF they don't want a holiday in Australia

I definitely agree with you about the stadiums though. One thing in our favour is that this gets decided in 2011.

This is probably a pipe dream but do you recall the stadium in Germany that had the removable pitch? It simply rolled out into the sunshine so it could get natural light on the grass and I think they could then use the inside of the stadium for something else.

[Bacon]

I'm pretty happy with our draw for the second stage (and feel qualification is possible)

Japan, Qatar, Bahrain & Uzbekistan.

We need to finish top 2 to make the World Cup, and our draw for home games favours the latter part of the campaign. Was a better group to be in... the other group has all 5 teams previously making the WC finals, whereas it's only Japan & us that have in ours.

And then the 5th placed side gets a 2nd chance, having a playoff against the Oceania side (probably NZ). We can beat any OFC side going around

[bennymacca]

looking good, with any luck we should be in!