Portugal discovers today “how much” a ticket to Qatar | international football
This Friday, a few minutes after 16:00 in mainland Portugal, it will be possible to predict the theoretical probabilities of a Portuguese national team being in the 2022 World Cup. But that will be after seeing the draw for the Pay (playing on the 24th and 29th of March) and analyze the opponents.
For now, in the real field of probabilities, the scenario is easy to plot: after having wasted the ticket “low cost”, Portugal will have to “pay ”a lot to go to Qatar, having only a 25% chance of being in the World Cup, with three places for 12 candidates.
For the national team, which does not miss a final phase of a major competition since the 1998 World Cup, to be in the Pay it has a sweet and sour taste. On the one hand, Portugal’s record in qualifiers of this type is 100% victorious, in addition to the fact that they will be able to face it with the status of seed. On the other hand, being forced into another 180 minutes of football was something the national team would disdain, especially in this Pay in concrete, which can be thornier than the previous ones.
Avoid Italy and “ask” Macedonia
It has become trivial to say that this Pay it is more difficult because it requires two games to be in the World Cup, but, strictly speaking, there is no change there: before, there were two games with the same opponent (home and away), while now there are also two games, but with different opponents (only a game with each).
What changes – and who may become this Pay more demanding – is that three out of 12 teams qualify (and not four out of eight, as in the past), in addition to the fact that Portugal may have to face a very high level team, like Italy.
Templates are simple. Of the 12 teams, six are seeded (Portugal, Scotland, Italy, Russia, Sweden and Wales) and will host the six least rated teams at home (Turkey, Poland, Northern Macedonia, Ukraine, Austria and Czech Republic).
Then, the winners of these six games will also face each other in a single match, “finals” from which the last three European countries qualified for the 2022 World Cup will come, joining Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Countries Netherlands, Croatia, England and Germany.
This is to say that, in the first game, Portugal must be favorites, but in the second, with some lack of fortune in the mix, they could face one of the other seeded players.
And the possible opponents will be defined this Friday, because the draw will point out the pairing for a “final” of the Pay, as well as which team will play at home in the second game.
100% success
not be Pay this is nothing new for Portugal, which insists on betting on the most tortuous path to reach the final stages of competitions. A journey through qualifying shows that, in this century, Portugal only twice, in 12 competitions, managed to qualify for the competition before the last gasp of the qualifying phase (2006 and 2016).
For the rest, qualifications were assured in the last round and, on three of those occasions, only after surviving a Pay: Portugal was at the 2014 World Cup, at Euro 2012 and at the 2010 World Cup, always using a knockout.
They were twice against Bosnia (2010 and 2012) and once against Sweden, in the famous Pay in which Cristiano Ronaldo made a hat trick in Solna, leaving the Scandinavians to watch the Worlds at home.