World Cup Qualifying 2010 Review: The Second Round

[Continuing a multi-part review on the 2010 World Cup qualifiers.  In this post I review the second round.]

In the second round the World Cup qualifiers started for everyone else in the confederation.  For the Big Two (USA and Mexico), the second round is never going to be very stressing. At least, it shouldn't be very stressing.  USA put eight goals past Barbados in Los Angeles without much trouble, and the away leg in Bridgetown felt like a scrimmage.  The 1-0 scoreline was met with grumbles in a few quarters (some of whom commented on this site), but the first leg had made the second match unimportant.  Mexico, in contrast, made their first leg against Belize harder than it had to be.  It didn't help that Belize's 'keeper Shane Orio had a tremendous game to limit Mexico to just a pair of goals.  The series was put beyond any doubt in Mexico City, but it was the start of a very unpleasant ride for the Mexican national team.

Once again there were a number of national teams that did not play their home legs in their own country.  I had originally written 'could' but all of them appear to have the capabilities to have home venues that can stage international matches, but chose not to do so.  St. Lucia gave away their home qualifier and staged it in Los Angeles, giving Guatemala in effect two home matches.  Bahamas sold their home qualifier to Jamaica, and that match was played in a cricket stadium in Trelawny in the western part of the country.  The most deplorable decision was made by the Belizean authorities who opted for a quick payoff in Houston's Reliant Stadium instead of preparing a home venue in their own country.  With the state of the Mexican team at that time, if that match had been played in Belize it's very possible that Belize could have drawn or even won.  As that article in Amandala implied, how can Belizean soccer fans be confident that any revenue that made it to the BFF's coffers would be managed properly?  The authorities will never open the books, and FIFA will always cover for them.

Results in Groups 1 and 2, with a couple of exceptions, went according to the form books.  The aggregate score for all but one of the series had at least a four-goal margin between winner and loser, and four of them had aggregate margins of eight goals or more.  In those seven series, the seven victors won their home legs by an aggregate score of 40-1.  Only Canada conceded a goal in their home leg.  The series that was the exception was the Bermuda-Trinidad & Tobago series.  Bermuda scored a shock 2-1 victory in Port-of-Spain and carried that advantage into their home leg in Hamilton.  However, Bermuda played nervously, gave up two goals, and let a historic opportunity slip through their hands.  Nevertheless, this series exposed the fissures in T&T football and marked the beginning of the end for Francisco Maturana.   It also marked the beginning of a T&T side that were subsisting on the fumes from their 2006 campaign yet scraped enough results to progress this time around.

Most of the dramatic action in the second round was in the Group 3 series. 

Costa Rica had struggled to replace its stars who left after the 2006 World Cup finals, and went through a year where they couldn't score or win games.  Grenada was a side that could have caused them trouble, but it all depended on the away match in St. George.  Costa Rica scraped through on a late goal by Víctor Núñez, and settled the tie with a comfortable 4-0 win, but Hernán Medford would not join them in the group phase.  The Nación newspaper, in its match report, concluded: "If this is the best Costa Rica can play, than let's say goodbye to South Africa."  Almost a premonition.  

Guyana had a bye to the second round ostensibly for their performance against Caribbean opposition in the previous two years, but the series against neighbors Suriname was going to be a toss-up.  This series was a test of Guyana's relative strength in the Caribbean, and the veracity of the FIFA rankings (which were no doubt used to award byes to teams).  Suriname won by the minimum at home and it looked like Guyana would turn things around at home.  But Suriname took advantage of weak Guyanese defending, scored two opportunistic away goals and went through.  It's a disappointing result for Guyana, but they should never been ranked that highly to begin with.

If ever there was a series where the winner should have been left vacant, it would have been Haiti-Netherlands Antilles.  The only way either one of these teams was going to score was at home, and neither side managed to do so.  It was telling that the only goal of the series was an own goal scored late in the second leg.  Haiti have progressed since the 2006 cycle but this series raised a lot of warning signs for them.

The most dramatic series of the second round was Panama-El Salvador.  After the successes of the 2006 cycle, which included an appearance in the Hexagonal and a run to the final of the 2005 Gold Cup, Panama were expected to win a series against an El Salvador side who had slipped in the previous two qualifying cycles.  El Salvador at the time had no foreign-based players; Panama had (and still do have) a number of players who feature in Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, and Poland. 

Perhaps those who had predicted a close series knew what they were talking about: Panama only won by the minimum goal, giving the Salvadorans an opening.  Then in San Salvador, Panama scored an early goal that would force El Salvador to score three.  The series turned on two plays: a shocking miss by Blas Pérez alone in front that would have clinched the tie for the Panamanians, and Panama's decision to drop back in a defensive bunker for the final 25 minutes.  You could also say that the tie really changed after the referee Marco Antonio Rodríguez called a controversial penalty that leveled the aggregate score.  I didn't think it was a legitimate penalty, but the call demoralized the Panamanians and threw the tie wide open.  Nothing could be done about the decisive third goal, which was straight out of the top drawer.  But it should never have gotten to that point - Panama will have to ask themselves how they, with their current generation of attacking talent, could get bounced out of the World Cup after only two matches.  As for El Salvador, this series signaled their renaissance.  

Here's how I'd categorize the performance of the second round participants, relative to previous WC participation:

Improved: El Salvador, Suriname, Belize, Bermuda, Haiti, Netherlands Antilles, Grenada, Cuba

Stagnated: Mexico, USA, Barbados, St. Lucia, Guatemala, St. Vincent and Grenadines, Canada, Jamaica, Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Antigua & Barbuda

Regressed: Panama, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, Costa Rica

Comments

[J]

I am really enjoying this look back at the qualification. I was wondering since the Fifa rankings are now being used to sead teams. Why do they fluctuate so much especially for concacaf teams? Sometimes teams like Cuba, Guatemala and others that were eliminated early will shoot up 20 spots or down without having played a game ahead of teams that were still playing like El Salvador. If Concacaf is going to use the rankings then perhaps they should rate the regions separately so it is more reflective of who is better once we move beyond teams that are always playing to teams that don't play as much and thus end up having their rankings out of whack. Its not as if many CONCACAF nations have played many games once they are bounced out of qualifying.

[Howard Hamilton]

I think this situation falls under "modeling noise". By that I mean that the differences between national teams at the lower end of the FIFA rankings is so small that a few results is enough to cause teams to move up or down the lists in a big way. You also see this at the top of the rankings but there are smaller moves among those teams.

As far as how to deal with this in the early qualifying rounds, I'm not sure you could do much more than draw a line above the bottom 22 teams, or perhaps have a preliminary round among the bottom 12 and give the rest a bye to the first round. CONCACAF did something similar to this in the 1998 qualifying cycle.

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