Wasn't The World Cup Draw Rigged?

[piggynose]

he did seem to take an age to reveal the team

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGSQVg-OG14

[redman41]

Rigged in favour of who piggynose ??
He's a poor illusionist, should have got Dynamo in to do the Draw !! :-)))

[piggynose]

who do you think redman?

[andy-hughes]

Rigged?

A competition organised by such a fine upstanding corruption-free bungless betting-scam bereft home for blatent shysters as world football?

Whatever gives you that idea!!

[VHG]

One thing that certainly WAS rigged was the way France were favoured in the draw (to please Mr Platini?).

Often 8 teams from Europe qualify so that makes it easy to have one European pot of 8 teams to go along with the other 3 pots of 8 teams.

Last time there were 9 teams in the European pot the lowest ranked European team were put into another pot with other low ranked teams from other parts of the world.

For this recent draw there were also 9 teams in the European pot, and because France had to qualify in a play off they were the lowest ranked European team.

But this time the lowest rank team were NOT put in another group but this "Group X" idea came out where one team from the European pot were picked at random to go in "Pot 2".

Of course this turned out to be Italy, who are ranked 7th and are far higher ranked than all the other teams in pot 2.

And of course England got picked in their group, which means England are the only European team in a group with TWO teams ranked higher than them (Uruguay are ranked 6th and Italy 7th).

And France are in a fairly easy group of Switzerland (Ranked 8th), Ecuador (ranked 23rd) and Honduras (ranked 41st).

In fact TWO teams in England's group are ranked higher than ANY of the teams in France's group.

So after France qualified for the last World Cup with a "handball" goal against Ireland in the play off, they now find with a bit of help from Platini they have an easy group whereas England have a really tough one.

[redman41]

If the Draw was truly rigged then England would be in a Group along with Spain, Germany, and Argentina. FIFA rankings 1,2,and 3, (England are currently 13th)