maplebanana

The data pretty much supports this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language_in_Europe Personally, in my travels in Europe the only place where I couldn't understand the train announcements was in England. It sounded like we weren't even speaking the same language!

Also among the final 40 - Jonathan David. What a world!

I think CONCACAF would. That's the match they want all the time, for $ sake. They set up the Gold Cup every time to ensure that they never face each other until the final.

I always appreciate Matt Doyle's support for Canada (even though he jinxes us every Gold Cup). And this lengthy article is giving us starving fans something to discuss, so that's great. But if we trot out a 3-5-2 with Miller/Fraser/Cornelius in the back line and leave Arfield and Hoilett on the bench, we are in deep, deep trouble.

Has the inter-confederation playoff opponents been confirmed anywhere else? It sounds to me that this might be a misquote / misinterpretation, because I don't think the draw has been held yet. Would absolutely love it if true, but as a CanMNT fan I'm conditioned to expect the worst.

I think you're referring to Shayne Lavery, the 20 year old forward. But the Canadian I know who plays for NI is Caolan Lavery, who has never had a senior cap for NI. Are they related?

According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_men's_national_soccer_team_results The (2nd) most recent victory was 34 years ago (4/2/85), but the prior time they played the USA was also a victory (11/1/80). So the last back-to-back wins was also 34 years ago, just that they were 5 years apart instead of 1 month.

Damn. What an odd rule. I still want to face China one day though. I want to see blood and tears! I guess we're stuck with Curacao, Panama, BVI, Guatemala, or Sint Maarten in CONCACAF. I wonder if two teams met halfway on a neutral ground, would that count?

Maybe it's the Friday afternoon crazy talk in my head, but I would love to see a friendly against China in November. They play in Dubai on Nov 14 but it looks like they're free for the rest of the window. Put them in Vancouver or Toronto, and that'd be a big draw to put some money into CSA coffers. I landed on them when I looked at the Elo rankings, trying to find a team that is high FIFA ranked but low Elo ranking (the opposite of us). They are about the same as us FIFA points wise, so we'd get 5 for a win. Selfishly, as a Canadian who is described by his Chinese colleagues as 'hardcore

Panama beating Mexico in CNL = 18.76 Panama beating UAE in friendly = 5.47

Updating and reuploading plot I made earlier. Examples: Easy Win: Our friends Dominica would net us 1.83 Tough Win: Curacao would net us 4.98 (this would be risky as hell since they are basically tied with us) Stretch Goal: Jamaica would net us 6.07 Given that we'd be in Florida, would a friendly at Bradenton make sense? T&T would net us 3.1...

Yes. A 1-0 loss to the USA puts us at 9 pts and +8, with the USA being 6 pts and +6. So if they beat Cuba 1-0 we are through. If they win 2-0 they win the tiebreak (goals for).

As someone who once taught undergrad Quantum Mechanics, and as someone who can't even get his liberty-village-living, soccer-loving friend to attend, I can confirm this is to be true.

sorry to spam the board with more math, but in case I don't have time to calculate the points, I made a plot that you can look it up: I limited it to -500 ... +500 because there are no teams 500 better or 500 worse than us right now. As you can see, the plot asymptotically approaches 0 for beating really bad teams, and approaches the multiplier value for beating really good teams. The multipliers here just scale the whole curve, and the points gained for beating the same rank as you is exactly 0.5 x multiplier. Hope this helps.

Best case, if we win the group via 4 wins, beat CRC in SF and MEX in F, we'd get 26.2 (GS) + 15.8 (CRC SF) + 17.9 (MEX F) = 59.9 pts. That would put us 30 pts ahead of ES. ES has 2 games in hand on us, but they can't get 30 points in those because the teams they're playing are all lower than them. I suppose our most 'likely' way to get in is to make it to the final of CNL, win some decent competitive friendlies in the other 2 windows, and hope that some of the minnows can get results (draws or wins both help) against ES in CNL.