The World Cup is getting towards its business end and we have already seen some upsets with Germany going home and many of the top teams yet to convince.
Group G has, however, played out mostly how people expected it when it was announced. A group that contained England, Belgium, Tunisia and Panama was expected to be fairly easy for the first two teams and it has played out that way so far with both England and Belgium racking up 6 points apiece and the final game between the two today means that one of them will need to top the group.
But they both wouldn’t want to
With the way things have gone in this World Cup and the way it has been arranged, the winner of the tie will face off against the second placed team in Group H and while that might seems like something that’s fairly navigatable, what comes next is harder.
Under the current arrangement, the winner of the group will go to slot ‘1G’ which unfortunately also houses four of the top seven teams in the world rankings and no team ranked lower than 15th.
The second placed team goes to slot ‘2G’ which apparently is milder with only one of the top nine teams in the world in this grouping and many of the other teams are 20th or lower.
Therefore, there’s a bigger benefit to finishing the group in second place. It would be interesting to see how this affects the performances of both England and Belgium tonight.
