Which four teams will complete Europe’s Challenge for World Cup Glory?

: Image via Wikipedia

Although many have called it unfair, the seeding system adopted for the play off matches to decide the final four European teams that will make it to the 2010 World Cup Finals in South Africa, has produced four potentially exciting match ups. The two leg matches will be played on November 14th and 18th with the highlight of the four seeing the Republic of Ireland take on France. The other three games are Portugal v Bosnia, Greece v Ukraine and Russia v Slovenia.

The seeding system which kept apart the four highest FIFA ranked teams meant that the likes of the Rep of Ireland could only play either, France, Portugal, Greece or Russia, which of course gave them a distinct disadvantage. However, in any two leg football match anything can happen and whilst underdogs, Ireland under the guidance of Giovanni Trapattoni will be confident of causing an upset if they can repeat the kind of form that saw them narrowly miss out in Group Eight.

The Republic’s game against France is one of those ties that definitely could go either way. The Republic is unbeaten in their world cup qualifying campaign and took world champions, Italy to the wire in their qualification battle. France meanwhile have struggled throughout their qualification campaign. Most unlike France of recent years, Les Bleus play with an obvious lack of direction, often dependent on individual moments of brilliance to get them home. One of the great providers of brilliance for them has been winger, Frank Ribery, but he will be missing from the two matches thus increasing Ireland’s chances of success.

In the other games, Portugal can certainly consider themselves lucky too on two counts, firstly because after a poor Group campaign that they finished runners up and secondly because they were seeded for the play-offs. However, they will not find Bosnia easy opponents. They had the misfortune to be grouped with world cup favourites, Spain, but they did extraordinarily well to gain the play-off spot above teams like Turkey and Belgium. This match could go either way.

Greece v Ukraine will be yet another extremely tight affair, but perhaps Ukraine will come into the two matches with a little more momentum, having beaten England in their penultimate group match to ease out Croatia from the play-off position. Greece will not relish travelling to Ukraine for the second leg in November and might find themselves as the seeded team, failing at the final hurdle.

Russia should have the edge in their match against Slovenia and will be favourites to book their place in South Africa next summer. That said, Slovenia are a tough side to beat at home and if they can get some sort of result in the first leg they will have an outside chance of upsetting the odds in Moscow.

The bookmakers odds suggest that it will be Russia, Portugal, France and Ukraine that will qualify, however, bookmakers aren’t always right when it comes to football. There is almost certain to be one shock outcome of the four games and that could well be Ireland.

Whoever the four successful teams are, they will be joining the nine European teams already qualified for the World Cup to spearhead the thirteen teams who will look to retain the trophy in Europe following Italy’s success in 2006. Denmark, Switzerland, Slovakia, Germany, Spain, England, Serbia, Italy and the Netherlands are already confirmed and any four of the remaining eight play-off teams are sure to complete a strong European challenge in South Africa. So much so that the World Cup odds are as short as 4/9 that a European team will win the tournament in South Africa.