Over the next month, there will most likely be a barrage of posts relating to soccer and, in particular, the World Cup. It was nice to see that Sports Illustrated did a section previewing the tournament. What I found to be of great interest was Grant Wahl’s bracket of how he thinks the tournament will unfold. The bracket can be seen by clicking here (I apologise for the poor quality, but you should be able to enlarge it for a better look). Wahl has Australia making the quarter finals (which is what I voted for in the previous sportsbbq poll) and beating the #2 ranked side in the world, the Czech Republic, along the way. I don’t know if I should feel excited about this or not - especially considering he has the Ivory Coast finishing ahead of Argentina in Group C.

Things keep looking better for the Socceroos. This past weekend they played the Netherlands (#3 in the world), and with 10 men they fought out a 1-1 draw.

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Australia’s weakness is definitely their defenders, and they will need to perform better in the next two weeks for Australia to make it through to the second round. A poor clearance is what led to Van-Nistelrooy’s goal, and Mark Schwarzer cannot be expected to save everything that is launched his way if his defenders are ineffective. Other than the one blemish, Schwarzer did a great job denying the Netherlands further goals in the game.

I’m looking forward to the 6am match against Japan next Monday morning. I won’t be going to work on time, and it would be nice if I could wear my Socceroos jersey in afterwards. I don’t think they would like that though. Now I just need to think up an excuse to leave at 11:30am to catch to catch the game against Croatia on June 22. I’m sure i’ll come up with something!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 10:50 am and is filed under Soccer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.