This week’s second major topic of conversation in international football circles has centred around the calls for minor nations (wherever they may be deemed to be cut off in the FIFA rankings) to pre-qualify before they are given the privelige of competing against the major nations in qualification for major tournaments.

Forcing so-called “minor” nations to play a pre-qualifying tournament only serves to ease the fixture congestion on the big boys and in doing so further guarantees their place at the top of the footballing tree. We’ve seen how a similar system along with my pet hate of seedings has ruined the Champion’s League (sic) as a competition where real outsiders (and let’s be honest folks, a major club like FC Porto are not minnows or unfashionable underdogs) have no chance of progressing due to a virtually rigged system of pre-qualifying rounds, group stages and return legs.

If the small nations don’t play anyone but each other then where does the romanticism of taking on the big boys on your own patch and giving them a scare go? As a Northern Irishman I’m intensely proud of our country of only 1.5m people having qualified for three World Cups and given a fine showing at them all. Our recent victory over England at Windsor Park highlights the necessity for all countries to be treated equally when it comes to inclusion in qualifying groups, despite what the self elected big guns may say.

Fellow SOTG writers Dave Fox and Jonathan Dewart have been punting some thoughts around on pre-qualifying on the forum and it’s an article that Mr. Dewart has found that I want to delve into to pick away at the arrogance of the views espoused in it.

Chris Waddle comes across as a typical arrogant English football fan in his comments in the aforementioned article saying that games against small countries are an absolute farce and are damaging football. Arsene Wenger agrees although his motives are more than likely down to his wishes to keep his threadbare squad injury free when they aren’t playing in his own club’s red ad white.

Neil Warnock makes the most ridiculous comment of all:

“It’s crazy in this day and age that big sides waste their time on useless opponents who never win.”

Maybe Mr. Warnock will now do the decent thing and take his Sheffield United side back down to the Championship from whence they came and save all the Premiership big boys wasting their time in taking three points off their “useless opponents” both home and away. What’s good for the goose, Mr. Warnock, is good for the gander.

It’s not often one can say that Glenn Hoddle has the most intelligent comment on a footballing issue but the former Spurs legend gives a fair and balanced view of how these games really add to the development of the nations in question. Hoddle points to large score drubbings of Turkey and Greece while he was playing for England but says that the experience the countries gained in those days have helped them to go on to become major European players with Greece even winning the European Championships. Stopping these games would stunt this development and Hoddle feels that would be a bad thing.

I agree Glenn. Chris Waddle can take his patronising two qualification places for “minnows” and stick it. Football is in the throws of purging the small and weak from it’s ranks both at club level and now on the international field as well, for the good of the game we can’t allow it to happen. Big isn’t always better.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 11:57 am and is filed under International Football News. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.