Sweet Nothings

Can it really be four years since the carnival of football that was the Brazil 2014 World Cup extravaganza? (Yes.) That tournament will be remembered for a cracking group stage full of expansive, attacking football that petered out - with one hilarious exception - into a mealy-mouthed defence-fest during the knockout stages. This negative trend continued into the newly-expanded Euros, whose new faces weren't good enough to play on the front foot but could shut up shop well enough to frustrate the decent teams (and England) and bore the arse off neutral spectators. So what will Russia 2018 bring, besides unprecedented corruption levels? (lol jk) The change in draw format to divide the pots by ranking has largely done away with the usual Group of Death/Big Team Cakewalk scenario, and with some intriguing debutants and a few absent stalwarts (ItaLOL, the NetherLOLs, the US of lAme, etc) we might get a bit more balance and/or novelty value. Here come the group previews! We al...

Group E Switzerland, Ecuador, France, Honduras The intricacies of FIFAs world ranking system are only marginally less opaque than those of their host-country selection/trough-feeding process. And so Switzerland are apparently the sixth best team in the world, despite their utter failure to do anything of note at a major championships. Maybe it’s all a deliberate ploy to give some lower-ranked teams a better chance of success – certainly Ecuador and Honduras will be far happier than had they drawn any of the other seeds, all of whom are actually any good. They do have the mercurial French to worry about, however. Their fantastic display of stereotype-confirming petulance in South Africa took some of the heat off England’s pathetic showing, and it’s true that they looked down and out after the first leg of their playoff against Ukraine. However, they did have the misfortune to be drawn in Spain’s qualifying group, practically condemning them to the playoffs from the off, and si...