regards,
SH

You have four hours to come good on this promise, Stephen. What about a prediction, at least, for Game 1? It might loosen the knot in my stomach.

We could have gotten lucky and landed in group H with Spain, Ukraine, and Saudi Arabia (instead of Tunisia), or Group G with France, Switzerland, and South Korea (instead of Togo), in which we would have been the second ranked team according to the much more useful ELO football rankings (the FIFA ones have some very notable anomalies, Australia’s lowly ranking and the United States’s ridiculously high ranking amongst the most obvious).

Looking ahead, the Asian championships are going to be very exciting; Iran, Turkey, and Japan should be very tough but beatable opponents for the title.

I would blood Beachamp for the defence. He has the goods.

with guus having more time with the squad I believe we will go further than the second round.

Injuries mean our key men will come in fresh.
This is very important.

Oley Oley Oley Oley Oley

I enjoyed the Guus feature in the Good Weekend on Sat.

BB Punster – You could be right about the midfield being a little stacked with AMs, almost went with Cahill as an impact-bench player and sticking Culina on the right. Don’t know what has happened to Emerton, he was superb about two, three years ago.

I haven’t seen Elrich play for a while, but if he is getting good reports from Lyn Oslo in Norway, you are right he should be one for the bench. Ahmad used to be a killer on the right flank at the Parramatta Power, unfortunately at Fulham he is stuck behind Steed Malbranque.

I’d still go with three centre-backs for safety’s sake and what Popo lacks in pace he makes up for in courage. I thought he was excellent in the first-leg against Uruguay when he played a full ninety despite having struggled to get a match at Palace for some months. It’s also a darn shame Thwaite is in a contract dispute with his team in Romania otherwise he’d be in contention for one of the three spots in central defence.

I used to be of the same opinion about Skoko, but he was one of the few Socceroos that put his hand in the last Confederations Cup debacle. Solid if unspectacular.

Schwartzer has been in sensational form, as has Kewell.I think we can hope for second spot in the group. Sucks that we’ve not been able to keep Goos though

Haven’t we had some great coaches

no Culina’s workrate is needed in the midfield and you can’t have too many attacking mid-fielders. leave Emmo at right back.
Lucas and Moorey should be a good and pacy back two.

I would like to think Erlich and his pace has a place on the bench.

both Poppa and Skoko are too slow.

It’s great news, esepcially as you say with the World Cup imminent.

However, if you could avoid inserting *font* tags in your text that would be really good. I just spent 20 minutes going through and stripping them all out. The site works by stylesheets which dictate the font and size, and it creates an untidy appearance to insert ordinary html tags in the text bodyIf you prefer to avoid actually writing your post in the Wordpress WYSIWYG window, you’d be best to write it in plain text in Wordpad or something, and then just use Wordpress to complete your formatting.

Anyway, welcome back to Troppo posting. Now, if only Geoff Honnor and Wendy could see their ways clear to posting occasionally, we’d be right back to vintage Troppo days again (well, better really, because we’ve got Nicholas).