This is becoming truly bizarre. First a female streaker interrupts the U.S. vs. Honduras match last night (the U.S. won 1-0 to win their group).
But that’s nothing compared to the shenanigans going on today. In the early game in the other group, Canada earned a very interesting 5-0 win over group leaders Guatemala. The upshot of which is Mexico now needs to beat Haiti by at least 5 goals just to advance to the next round. Now we’re not talking about two countries who are not on great terms to begin with, and word is Guatemala was less than thrilled with Mexico’s showing in their final World Cup qualifier against T&T (Mexico lost 2-1 to knock Guatemala out and put T&T in) and maybe this is payback. Maybe not, and maybe Guatemala’s 2nd string is just that bad. Guatemala had already advanced and the game meant next to nothing to them.
Anyway there’s a few minutes left in the first half of Mexico vs. Haiti and Mexico has a 1-0 lead. They’ll need at least four more.
UPDATE: The weird becomes the absurd as the Haitians get two men sent off, and the race was on in the 2nd half. Mexico does wind up scoring the five goals they need…
…but also conceded a flash goal to Haiti. Mexico missed at least a dozen easy scoring chances as Haiti’s defense collapsed from exhaustion and Mexico comes up a single goal short and fails to qualify for the 2008 Olympics. The U.S. plays Canada and Guatemala plays Honduras, with the winners of each game going to the Olympics.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Donald A. Coffin // Mar 17, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Isn’t part of the problem the extremely small number of matches played in the qualifying “tournament”? this inflates the importance of individual match outcomes. And, as you note, the entire score-differential thing can make any meaningful determination of who “really” belogs quite difficult.
2 Pez // Mar 26, 2008 at 9:31 am
I’d agree with the first comment. In any case, I think it would make sense to have the final four play a round robin the same way they do in two groups when eight teams remain. Why waste time with the meaningless finals and third-place game?
Also, the Mexico-Haiti game was the most entertaining I can remember. Why did Haiti not move more people into defensive roles after getting two red cards? And Mexico had more chances in the last 10 minutes than the US created all tournament!
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