View Full Version : So how is Africa to pick it's 06 WC participants?
ursula
26 Oct 2002, 10:25 PM
That's the subject of this BBC article. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/africa/2360521.stm) Right now I'm in favor of the five-ANC-qualifying-group-winners option but I'll need to think about it a bit more. Anyone have any opinions?
desertfox2
27 Oct 2002, 02:26 PM
I'm sorry but I'm a bit confused by this proposal. If there are 5 groups in qualifying with the top 5 qualifying for the World Cup Finals, what about Egypt and the defending champion? They will have byes into the Finals and won't be playing in the qualifiers. Also, wasn't this idea of putting the World Cup qualifiers in with the ANC 2006 tourney supposed to lessen the amount of games played? Having 5 groups would mean way more matches. Plus, exactly how many nations would they plan on having in each group? As it is right now in the 2004 ANC qualifiers, there are 46 teams total. That's like 9 per group which is quite drastic. I would assume they would have some type of preliminary round(s) to lessen the amount of teams in each group which they don't have right now. I guess it could work, but it would definitely have to be thought out more.
ursula
27 Oct 2002, 05:22 PM
Yeah there a lot of unanswered questions in the "qualification" proposal. My initial thought is that under this proposal Egypt and the defending champ would still be in the qualifying groups for WC purposes but regardless of where they finish in their qualification group they'd still be in the ANC finals. That way Egypt doesn't get a boost to it's chances to get to Germany.
As to the numbers of teams in each qualification, I agree that nine per group is too much. They could play a preliminary round that would, with a couple of teams getting byes (like the WC participants from Japorea), pare it down to 25 teams, five per group. But somehow I think that the backers of this proposal are thinking of 6-7 teams per group, eliminating the true lightweights in a preliminary round of some sort.
Anyways that's how I look at this proposal and I could be completely wrong! We'll see as more info comes out...