Eight Teams Through, Eight More to Go

June 20th, 2006 | by: WC Bob |

We are two-thirds of the way through group play with each group playing its first two games. Thirty-two of the 64 games are in the books. Eight teams have already secured a spot in the knockout stages and seven teams have been eliminated. Starting on Tuesday, the groups will play the matches simultaneously to help assure the competitive integrity of the matches. Just a reminder that the first set of games Tuesday will start an hour later than the starting time of the first games up to this point so plan your viewing/work excuses accordingly.

Here’s a look at who’s in and who’s out as of today. As you can see, there are a lot of big name teams that have taken care of business early on and now will play for positioning in the next round. There are still some slots open for surprise teams but this is shaping up to be a tournament of the traditional powers.

Who’s in:
Germany
Ecuador
England
Argentina
Netherlands
Portugal
Brazil
Spain

Who’s out:
Poland
Costa Rica
Paraguay
Serbia and Montenegro
Ivory Coast
Iran
Togo

Who’s playing for their lives:

Everyone else

You can the various qualifying scenarios nicely broken down here.

International Football News – World Cup Blog RSS Feed

diego

How about these for the round of 16 matchups:

GER | | ENG/SWE
SWE/ENG | | ECU

POR | | ARG
NED | | MEX

ITA | | BRA
AUS/CRO | | GHA/USA

KOR/SWI | | SPA
UKR | | FRA

Notice that England might end up with all the South American teams on one side. And that the left bottom quarter of the bracket looks fairly doable for Italy.

I’m personally looking forward to these quarter final matchups:
Brazil vs. Spain
Germany vs. Nederlands
and for the cherry on top:
Argentina vs. England once again :)
diego

Ohh… The post didn’t take the blank spaces.!!! Messed up all my bracket construction! :(
diego

Anyways, you get the idea.
Just add a lot of blank spaces between the ||.
werttrew99

So far, my predictions for the final 16 have held true. Call me crazy, but I still see South Korea, Tunisia, USA, and Angola making it through to the Final 16, with France, Ukraine, Mexico, and Czech Republic crashing out.

I see the final 16 as so;

Germany vs Sweden
Netherlands vs Angola (Angola beats Iran, Mexico loses to Porgual; the Netherlands beat Argentina to take the top of Group C)
England vs Ecuador
Portugal vs Argentina
Italy vs Croatia (Australia could very well defeat Croatia to take this slot, however)
Switz vs Tunisia (France gets caught in yet another draw with Togo and is eliminated, Switerland finished atop of the group; Tunisia shocks Ukraine with a win)
Brazil vs USA (USA beats a Ghana hamstrung by red card absences; Italy soundly defeats Czech Republic)
Spain vs S.Korea
King Richard

I hope you are right with all your predictions werttrew99!!!
greg

i don’t know but eventhough argentina is a very good team it seems they sometimes take things too easy like in the case of their game against ivory coast…. what do you think?