World Cup 2010: Entry 2

To my mind, the first round of matches at the World Cup 2010 reveled that some teams were obviously better prepared than others and that is unsurprising. The unsurprising part is that the host nation saved its firepower for the last match and ended up with a victory that was of little consequence. So for all the goodwill from many supporters at home and abroad, the home team went out of the tournament at the first round. based on their overall performance over three matches, no sensible person would argue that their exit was unfair because Mexico and Uruguay were demonstrably better teams.  

This brings the discussion to the next "Home Teams", which are the teams from the host continent of Africa. Here too, as the SPI showed, few of them performed in a way that would suggest that African football is on a definitive rise as a force to be reckoned with in international soccer. And yet most African teams won only a single match at best and Cameroon, lost all its matches at the group stage. Apart from falling for cheap baiting by other teams, the African teams showed the inability to stay composed under pressure in addition to woeful finishing by strikers. The redeeming thing about African soccer during this tournament remains the goalkeepers who prevented them from conceding dozens of goals. Otherwise, the objective view must be that African soccer still has to resolve systemic weaknesses in team selection, managing player composure during intense pressure and better command from the skippers. Notwithstanding Ghana's qualification for the round of 16 and subsequent elimination of team USA, I do not think that it redeems the overall poor performance by the five African teams.

Finally, the fact that none of the finalists in the preceding tournament reached the round of 16 shows that four years can alter the dynamics of competition substantially. Tactics aside, I think that both France and Italy had fairly aged players though that alone cannot explain the inability to play decently. Whatever the internal divisions in either squad, they did not deserve to play beyond the first three matches.