Studs Up

In a wild, desperate, somewhat surreal last throw of the dice Ireland actually asked if they could be the 33rd team at the 2010 World Cup. Ignoring the obvious difficulties of tacking on an extra country to the normally-32 team tournament, it was a ballsy move that was met presumably with an equally ballsy “Err… no.”

It is a travesty what happened to Ireland, but to give them any sort of special treatment for a fairly common occurrence in football, that of the referee error affecting a match result, simply because it was a higher profile affair would be madness. You’d have to go back and retroactively correct every error prior and who knows what group standings we’d end up with. Costa Rica were already waiting in the bushes for any sign of weakness at FIFA.

Admittedly, if FIFA wanted to start acting like they were interested in the fairness of the modern game they probably shouldn’t reveal that they’re only deciding the rules for seeding the tournament two days before the actual draw. Two days! It stinks of wanting to give themselves till the last minute to see which teams progressed and how best to adjust the rules to help the “big teams” get through. The only thing worse would be if they decided to seed the recent qualifying playoffs at the last minute in order to help those same big teams progress at all.

Oh wait…