FIFA World Cup 2018 - GROUP H [Poland, Senegal, Colombia, Japan - 19/24/28 June] **spoilers**

drunkenmaster said:
Lawro being his usual idiot self, saying it's a farce because it's easy to get yellow cards and goals are more difficult. Yeah, it's the team with less yellow cards who goes through, not the team with more.

Meh, fact is groups work in such a way that some teams will get smashed due to someone being in their group and goal difference wouldn't be as fair due to the way teams rest players in the third game if they are through. Discipline and playing fairly or not is something that is more consistent across the three games. Just because GD has been used before we're used to it doesn't make it better.
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The groups are still decided based on goal difference first, followed by goals scored, then head to head, then fair play.

I assume Lawro meant that it's easy to pick up yellow cards so it seems harsh to be knocked out on that. It does however seem much fairer than FIFA rankings, if that's what used to happen.
 
Hopefully England are clever enough to make sure we come second in the group. ******** to all this moral rubbish. If it's within the laws then we should exploit them to get as far as possible in the competition.

With the draw as it is, this could be the difference between reaching the semi finals vs. reaching the quarters. It's massive. We could reach the semis at a canter and blag it to reach the final ffs.
 
when prem league teams field the kids in the fa cup etc they get hammered by the fa

same should happen in this world cup, the playing not to win shown by france and Denmark recently is bordering on match fixing imo
 
The_One said:
when prem league teams field the kids in the fa cup etc they get hammered by the fa

same should happen in this world cup, the playing not to win shown by france and Denmark recently is bordering on match fixing imo
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I think pundits are mostly being moronic, it's less playing not to win, it's playing to keep your squad intact for difficult games. You have guys on yellow cards risking bans for big games, some players have knocks and the chance to rest for a few more days is a big deal and simply the situation in which a guy on the bench is about 99.999% less likely to pick up a nasty tournament ending injury.

If you're through you're through, it's a cup knock out game. If you want to win you will have to play top teams and teams perform strangely in cups. You can lose to Mexico or thrash Germany/Argentina/Brazil. Teams don't honestly car about avoiding teams or who they face in the next round, pundits just think they do. They care about their star playing being available for the knock out game. Kane isn't starting not to avoid winning the group but to avoid him picking up an injury that causes him to miss whoever we play in the round of 16.
 
One way to maybe make it better would be so sort the order of games to be played by fifa ranking so the harder games come first.

So within each group:

R1 vs R2 - R3 vs R4
R1 vs R4 - R2 vs R3
R1 vs R3 - R2 vs R4

It wouldn't stop this happening, but at least you see the top tier matches as competitive games.

At the end of the day the JPN v POL match os no more of a bad game then the Eng v Bel reserves game.

As for fair play, I'm perfectly happy with that, it's very hard to play 3 games and not pickup may cards. If you have to resort to dangerous play or cheating fouls to win points then you aren't as good as the team that didn't get as many.
 
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