vorosmccracken.com

In

Algeria, Greece, France, Portugal, Slovenia, Uruguay = 100%. The Algerians pulled themselves together after a trying final match and Antar Yahia’s goal sends them through to the World Cup. Excellent perseverance by them. Watched the Greece/Ukraine matchup and Dimitris Salpigidis’ goal came pretty much out of the blue and Ukraine couldn’t seem to break apart the Greek defense from there. Full credit to Greece for a well taken goal and excellent team defending. And then France vs. Ireland and… Well we’ll get to that. The Portuguese wound up winning both matches by identical scorelines to send Bosnia-Herzegovina home. Now they hope Real Madrid bombs out of as many competitions as possible to try and keep C. Ronaldo as fresh as possible for next summer. Road goals can be big, but few have been bigger than Nejc Pe?nik’s in the previous Russia/Slovenia encounter. Zlatko Dedi?’s goal in the 44th in this one sends Slovenia to their 2nd World Cup and sends Guus Hiddink’s Russian team crashing out. Any Uruguayan fans who bought into the theory that they were going to waltz over Costa Rica are now disabused of that notion as the Ticos put a big scare into them. Uruguay nevertheless held on with a 1-1 home draw, sending them through 2-1 on aggregate as the 32nd and final team to qualify.

Out

Egypt, Ukraine, Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russia, Costa Rica = 100%. Heartbreak to come up short at the final hurdle. Egypt needed an awful lot of things to go their way just to get here and they couldn’t quite get it done in the final playoff match. Ukraine looked good today, but just couldn’t get the goal. A bit of a shame since they would have been a very entertaining team to watch next summer as a neutral. Ireland… Like I said I’ll get to that. The Bosnia-Herzegovina team was the only one you could argue that was overmatched in its playoff, but they really didn’t play that badly. They simply lost to a better team. The Russians will rue that goal they allowed at home for a long time as they bow out in a major upset losing 1-0 on the road. And it’s fitting that Costa Rica is the last team eliminated, because they’re probably the correct answer to “which team came closest to qualifying that didn’t.” They were only seconds away from qualifying directly from CONCACAF. They fought bravely and Walter Centeno’s goal certainly kept things interesting. They are one of the favorites to qualify out of CONCACAF every cycle, so they’ll be back.

Voros Takes on Organized Gambling!!

In a previous installment I compared my percentages to the bookies. For no particular reason and with no particular meaning ascribed to it, I thought I’d just check the results versus our predictions:

Winning Team    Voros  Bookies
France         74.78%   70.91%
Portugal       84.52%   70.91%
Greece         46.65%   46.67%
Slovenia       28.93%   21.69%
Uruguay        73.09%   73.13%
New Zealand    38.27%   42.34%
Cameroon       72.20%   74.38%
Nigeria        31.35%   26.04%
Algeria        70.01%   63.75%

I suppose if you wanted to keep score, you’d throw out the two which were essentially equal, and that would be 5 for Voros and 2 for Bookies. The only one I might even think about taking credit for was Nigeria having maybe a better shot than the bookmakers’ odds predicted. Other than that, there’s really not much to any of the disagreements. The Portugal odds difference was due mostly to the Ronaldo injury though I bet if I had some way to make an adjustment I wouldn’t have adjusted it down quite that far. I don’t know if folks have been overrating Russia since Euro 2008, but at this point it’s a possibility worth considering.

main de Dieu

Oh dear, whatever happens from here, it just can’t be good.

**sigh** I know how this feels, really I do:

But I can’t sympathize with calls for instant replay for these kinds of decisions. A 2nd on field ref? Sure, that seems to me a reasonable suggestion even if some disagree, but I just loathe the use of replay in American sports. It creates all sorts of bizarre rule changes that force refs to then micromanage every call. The problem is one of bad refereeing, not of a lack of replay. Having to stand around for 10 minutes trying to figure out whether you should celebrate or not kinda sucks, and there’s already too much of that in this sport IMO. If they want to limit it very strictly to “ball crossing the line” technology, I’ll live with that. But reviewing handballs? No way.

The Irish have been screwed, no doubt, but they wouldn’t necessarily have qualified anyway and are just going to have to live with it as best as they can. No fun, I know, but there’s little else that can be done now.