LFC2007 wrote:Owzat wrote:So by your logic anyone could win it because no past record counts? The fact that Paraguay have played in the past three World Cups and done FA doesn't actually register with you, just carry on having an uninformed dig at someone else who has done some research rather than just blown hot air because they don't like what they've read.
I didn't say I was basing it on events 20 years ago, maybe if you'd looked into it you'd see that they haven't done anything in the past three World Cups. if we're basing potential winners on qualifying then England have to be a candidate. Only Spain picked up more points in qualifying, in arguably a weaker group than England's, with England's only defeat 1-2 in Ukraine who reached the QFs in 2006
"I've seen them play and they looked good" - wow, they're dead certs for the cup then......................Give yourself a "real football fan" pat on the back for basing your assertions very much on your eyesight and judgement, expect a scouting call up or even better from LFC or another big club if you're right :rolleyes:
You will always get the odd side doing unexpected things in a tournament, but I am sure it won't be Paraguay.
But to further expose your uninformed opinion, SEVEN of Paraguay's 10 wins in qualifiers were at home. They won't have that luxury when playing in South Africa. The sides they did beat away were Venezuela, Chile and Colombia, and both Chile and Colombia won in Paraguay.
You talk of "good sides", well funnily enough the big footballing nations tend to remain so regardless of little dips. I would say it is unlikely the "best side" that everyone thinks is Spain will win, in the same way some won't write off Germany I wouldn't write off Argentina. These sides rise to the big occaision, maybe not every tournament, but they're not big footballing nations without reason. Just like a Portugese or French side might win the European Cup every now and then, but you'd expect the winners to be from Spain, England or Italy as has been the case for the past six seasons straight and 11 of the last 13.
The favourites don't always win the World Cup, people are underestimating the importance of the location of the cup although some may place too much significance on it and start talking up African nations.
Correct, any team that is in the world cup by definition "could" win the world cup. But instead of trying to debate the undebatable I prefer to assess how likely a team is to win the world cup, hence the analysis I made of each of the likely contenders for the title, plus the suggestion of an outside bet (that's right, outside bet = much less likely to win). I didn't say Paraguay were likely to win the World Cup, in fact I made it patently obvious that that is NOT what I think. The fact that they haven't come close to winning previous tournaments is a reflection of an underlying relative weakness in the level of footballers Paraguay produce, and that is still reflected in the team they have now, hence they are my "outside bet" to perform the unexpected. However, and this is the point, IF Paraguay - for whatever reason - suddenly produced a generation of players that compared favourably to the main contenders in ANY World Cup, and IF I had seen that team play and play comparably well, I would READILY discard that vastly unfavourable historical record as a basis for my judgment because records have no actual bearing on the outcome, whereas players and managers - expressed best in a team's recent performances - DO have an actual bearing on the outcome, and therefore an analysis that is centred on the current state of a team is a much more sound basis for judgment than any historical record. Such judgments are ignorant of the considerable variances that can and do occur in teams (examples in my last post) and they therefore limit your degree of insight (and fun, because trying to narrow the pool of contenders and pick out the potential surprises is) into what might happen.
Spot on.
, the food's 
