How much do we blame Group E for the US exit? (Eng-Ecu spoiler) [R]

I bring this up while watching England-Ecuador. England moved on almost in spite of itself...they haven't looked convincing at all this tournament. Lousy 4-5-1

To me, it seems like the difficulty of Group E is lost in the commotion of tactics, player selection, and the US' performance. This was one of the two most difficult groups in the World Cup this year. Before the Cup, I thought we would emerge from the group with Italy, but by no means thought it was a given. We didn't play well, but probably would have gotten out of the group stage if we were placed elsewhere.

My question for the BigSoccer community: How much blame do you place on the draw?

I think it goes without saying that before the World Cup, we should have expected to make the next round if we had been in any other group. However, after seeing our performance in group play, I'm not sure.

I'd like to think our general malaise and lack of production was just too much Czech Republic too soon. But if it's something else (e.g. DMB comments on being frustrated prior to the first game), then I'm not so sure.

I expect once some time has passed we will hear more about some locker room problems or issues with Arena from the players. Of course, until BA's future is decided, I don't think we'll be reading any earth-shattering exposes.

I'd say it cost us at least a point, if not three. I think if we're in a group with two European teams and a fluff team, there's a good chance we go through.

The comparison to England's performance is interesting. Both playing a 4-5-1, coincidence? I think not.

A lot.

Given England's wealth of Talent, They have played like shiite......

the 4-5-1 is not working for them either. The difference is they have used that formation a lot with Sven fuc*ked up negative tactics. I will be glad when he and BA are no longer coaching.

Certianly one of the contributing factors to our early exit. Look at France, they have been playing like crap since the get go and went to the round of 16 in spite of it. Even traditional powerhouses like England, Portugal, and even Brasil started out comparitavely slower than expected and managed to stumble out of thier groups. Most likely any other group except for a\maybe group c, we have a better chance of advancement.

I don't blame the group. It was harder than most of the groups in the world cup and if we hadn't played so badly we would have advanced from it. I think it was our own poor play(and some reffing) that caused us not to advance.

Spain and Ukraine both played like crap and advanced anyway because Tunisia and Saudi Arabia are absurd jokes.

Switzerland, France, and S. Korea were all underwhelming and yet all more or less had a great deal of control of their own destiny going into the final game save France (which needed one side to win) because there wasn't a team in G better than mediocre at best.

Australia and Croatia both struggled against Japan and yet controlled a great deal of their own destiny, we destroyed half of Japan's A side in a friendly.

Mexico advanced despite playing 3/4's of a garbage game against Iran, and sucking donkey root against Angola (and we were upset we only beat Angola 1-0?).

England required nearly 90 minutes to put one in the net against T&T, and if not for John Terry and a poor ref, easily could have lost while Sweden drew T&T and both struggled against Paraguay who probably should have lost or drew with T&T. Sweden and England advanced.

In A, Germany struggled to keep Costa Rica from scoring at home with their A side, struggled with Poland, and beat an Ecuador b team while Ecuador played solid-very good in the group.

The answer is this, there were only two groups in which teams had to really play well to advance in in this tournament. C and E, the rest of the groups were absurd jokes, with two strong teams and complete crap around them (A, and H for example), or a bunch of teams playing crappy and advancing inspite of themselves because of their draw (B, D, F, and G).

I argued throughout '04 and '05 that we were a side that was good enough to advance given a decent to good draw, but that wasn't good enough to survive bad luck in the draw like a Holland, Argentina or Italy were. When we drew E back in December my initial reaction mirrored the title of the first post-draw commentary thread "We're Screwed".

In many ways, it's a tribute to the side that we could play well below our skill and talent level and yet be a ref that isn't complete ---- away from advancing out of the co-group of death.

The only disappointments this cup for me were in how underwhelming the side was and the poor coaching/strategy from bruce, combined with the poor luck of getting two of the worst reffed games of the group stage (other games like Ivory Coast-Argentina, Ivory Coast-Holland, Spain-Ukraine, and Croatia-Australia come to mind as equally bad and I'm sure there were more).

This side would have advanced out of A, D, G or H easily, even playing this badly, if switched with another Concacaf/AFC side, and probably could have advanced out of B, and F as well, even playing that crappy and that's a testament to how bad our luck was this year.

Even as poorly as we played, if you switch us with the team in the other groups who were drawn out of our pot (Costa Rica, T&T, Serbia, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia) then I think we definitely qualify out of groups A, D, and H (although we couldn't have been drawn into D), and have a very good chance to qualify out of B, F, and G.

If we had a seed like Mexico did, we would have gone through. Having to play one tough European nation (and lose) and two patsies would have definitely been reachable for us.

Otherwise, I don't blame the draw at all. I mean, we got killed by the Czechs and poor decisions lost us points against Italy and Ghana ... but great teams should be able to get by those controversial calls and shellackings by better (?) teams. I blame poor tactics more than anything (Bruce Arena). Donovan did shyte all WC and yet Arena kept him in. Sure, DMB looked like crap half the time, but part of that was Donovan's fault. And DMB did have the assist to Dempsey's goal. Starting with a 4-5-1 in a game where we needed to win to have a chance? I don't know. In retrospect, EJ played horribly, but I would rather have seen him start against Ghana in an attacking 4-4-2 instead of coming in as a sub.

Mexico got a seed (a joke--we didn't deserve one, but neither did they), otherwise I agree. Serbs were highly rated before the Cup (they were undefeated in qualiftying, I think, beating out Spain in their group), but melted down. I think we would have gone through in most of the other groups, although we would have been knocked out in the Arg-Holland group.

The conventional wisdom is that you want to try and avoid Brazil in the Group stage, and Arena said as much back in December. I don't agree. The good thing about Brazil is that you can usually count on them to win every game and win the group with 9 points. That leaves three average teams fighting for one spot. In that scenario I would have fancied the USA's chances. Given the way things turned out, I would have taken that Brazil group over group E any day.

Wagman over at soccertimes.com is saying they should seed all 32 teams to get around this. Anyone care to explain what he means?

I blame it a lot. The way we played would have gotten out of most groups. Remember, the other team can make you look worse than you are.

I wonder if England fans will roast Lampard the way USA fans roast Donovan. Lampard was pathetic today.

Argentina would have gone out if not for Jared Borgetti heading the ball into his own net. Heinze's blunder and Argentina's overall crap play would have been roundly derided. England and Argentina are in the quarterfinals after games that were probably of the level of our performance against Czech Republic.

Holland and Portugal sure didn't look like two high quality European sides. I thought I was watching a Brazilian league game on the old Fox Sports World (I watched it twice, and after the second game, where three players were red-carded in one play, decided I'd watched enough thugball).

Only Germany has looked good. If not for Brazil (and maybe Spain), I would like Ghana and Italy both to go deep, and I would take either of them against England, Argentina or Portugal based on how those three teams played this weekend.

They currently divide the teams into four pools: the seeds, unseeded European teams, and then two other pools. One team from each pool is "randomly" placed into each group.

If all 32 teams were seeded and then placed into groups, it would look like the NCAA tournament, where 1 plays 32, 3 plays 31, etc etc.

I think the groups would look like this (numbers are the seed):

A
1, 16, 17,32

B
2, 15, 18,31

C
3, 14, 19, 30

D
4, 13, 20, 29

E
5, 12, 21, 28

F
6, 11, 22, 27

G
7, 10, 23, 26

H
8, 9, 24, 25

Then in the second round, A would get H, B would get G, C would get F and D would get E.

Basically, take two NCAA tournament regionals and combine them into one tournament.

Had this been done in this Cup, the USA would have advanced. I believe we were 9th, barely missing the seed. We would have wound up with Italy and the 24th and 25th best teams in the tournament.

So essentially, each team would be assigned a seed from 1-32 for the purposes of the Cup...so they would have to determine who would be ranked from 1-32, right?

Yes, they would just apply the same seeding formula they use anyway to all 32 instead of just the top 8.

It was a big reason. I mean if the US switches with even Costa Rica, we are probably in the next round. And then in the 2nd round, it's a whole other ball game. Remember in 2002 the US didn't look that great in group play. Good win against Portgual, but then meh.. but in the elimination rounds the team stepped it up.

Someone else already explained the mechanics, but the idea behind this is that the Pots are very unbalanced across confederation lines. In our pot, no one wanted us or a wild card Euro team. In the Africa/S America pot, no one wanted Ghana/Ivory Coast. Of course there are also the stronger Euro teams screwing things up like Czech, Portugal, NED etc. I think now that the US, some of the Asian teams, and some of the African teams have begun to elevate themselves above their peers, the groups are becoming more variable.

Portugal USA Ivory Coast vs. Croatia T&T Togo

It means 8 #1 seeds, 8 #2 seeds etc

Imagine this horror scenario for 2010.

The rankings going into this world cup for seeding was

8. Italy 44 points
9. Holland 43 points
- USA 43 points

Next time there will only be FIVE Euro seeds again, imagine the following scenario:

Seeds:
South Africa
Brazil
Argentina
England
Portugal
Germany
Spain
France

Certainly not out of the realm of possiblity depending on how far France and Portugal go.

That would leave the following 2 countries to be able to be drawn together: Italy, Holland

Furthermore, both of those teams could be drawn into Brazil's group (can't have 3 Euro in 1 group)

Furthermore, the USA or Mexico could be drawn in the same group.

Imagine that nightmare scenario:
Brazil
Italy
Holland
USA/Mexico

If all teams were seeded: Italy, Holland, Mexico, and MAYBE the USA would all get 2 seeds, and, therefore, could not be drawn together.

I blame it very little.

We wouldn't have won any group. In other groups, yeah we might have squeaked into an unconvincing 2nd place, a la Ukraine. Only to be cannon fodder in the Round of 16.

This team didn't have it. Frankly, CONCACAF didn't have it. We got 1 point, T&T got one point, Costa Rica got a goose egg. Mexico's sole victory was over Iran.

Big fish, small pond. We gotta find a way to get to a bigger pond more often, otherwise 20 years from now we'll still be at Mexico level.

I suggest you take a look on the England forum for your answer, people have been calling for him to be dropped since the second game. Lampard is stinking it up this tournament...

He's right and it's hard to understand why it wouldn't be done beyond trying to gift crap teams advancement to the knockout rounds and since the teams that have sprung the upsets have almost always done it within difficult groups (because crap teams tend to play too crappy to advance) I don't see a justification for the lack of seeding of all sides.

It's essentially what Europe does for qualification to the Euro's. All the teams are seeded based on results into different pots, there is the Seed Pots (the top 8 sides over a certain amount of years), then the second tier, third tier pot, fourth tier pot and so on.

This insures that every group will be fairly balanced, and will make it much harder to have the ridiculous set up we had this past time (C and E being murderous, A, D, G, and H being absurd jokes, B and F being moderately tough).

It's likely that if that had been done it would look like this:

Pot 1: The Seeds: Germany, England, Argentina, Mexico, Italy, Brazil, France, Spain

Pot 2: The Solid Performers: USA, Paraguay, Sweden, Holland, Portugal, Croatia, S. Korea, Tunisia

Pot 3: The so-so's: Ecuador, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, Czech Republic, Japan, Switzerland, Saudi-Arabia, Poland

Pot 4: No Reputations: T&T, Iran, Australia, Togo, Ghana, Ukraine, Angola, Serbia and Montenegro


Seeds would be deterimined by a combination of recent cup appearances and how they did, combined with confederation tournament performances and other measurables.

Once these pots were assigned, no teams from the same pot could be placed together. There would still be a risk that some groups would be unbalanced, and as the seedings for Euro '08 qualifying suggests, it can and does happen (Greece received a #1 seed for winning the '04, and the pot 2 and pot 3 teams that were assigned to Greece's group were essentially the worst sides in pot 2 and 3 making for an extremly easy group for Turkey to advance out of, even with the fifa mandated punishments for the disastrous playoff with the Swiss eight months ago). That being said, using this system would insure a stronger balance of groups, with each group generally having an elite side, a good side, a sub par side and a crap side. The only problems would be that some sides that have never appeared before and done badly in a confed championship (Ghana for instance) would be assigned to a pot that doesn't make sense based on their lack of world cup history and them crashing out of the cup of nations.

However this system is ultimately infinitely more fair than the current system. Additionally when you have France and Mexico as seeds you've got a major problem with your system. France has been a non-entity in international terms since they won Euro '00 six years ago. They barely advanced out of group play despite being a seed two years ago and were quickly dumped on their rears, why they got a seed after that performance and being a disaster at World Cup '02 I simply do not understand and Mexico's seed is completely inexplicable as well.

What's happened with him btw? He seems to have regressed since a sterling '04-'05 season, the 7 or 8 times I saw him with Chelsea this year he was underwhelming as well, and I can't remember seeing him in an England Jersey when he wasnt placing both palms on his head and asking God, "why did i miss yet another sitter?" It's been bizarre, maybe it's confidence, he certainly hasn't had any successes to build upon in this tournament.