Argentina qualify but impressive Spain must be the favourites

A late Mario Bolatti goal gave Argentina the win they needed in Uruguay to see them through to the world cup finals in South Africa next summer. As I said yesterday, the troubled and troubling campaign will now be forgotten as Diego Maradona and his men prepare for the finals and will no doubt be installed as one of the favourites to win it.

Celebrating

Their were a few other teams celebrating qualification last night and they included some big names and some new ones in relation to the world cup.

Honduras is a country in turmoil afyer a military coup earlier on in the year. Despite that their football team has qualified for the world cup finals for only the second time in their history. A 1-0 win over El Salvador was enough to seal their place, but only when the USA, who had already qualified, produced a late goal to beat Costa Rica.

Enough

Slovakia qualified top of their group after an early own goal was enough to beat Poland.

Switzerland will also be in South Africa after they got the 0-0 draw they needed against Israel. It didn’t go according to plan for the Swiss however as they had to hang on for the last thirty minutes with ten men after having Avihay Yadin sent off.

Failed

Teams that made it to the play-offs include Uruguay, as Ecuador failed to get a result in Chile, Portugal who had an easy 4-0 win over Malta, Greece with a narrow win over Luxembourg, Slovenia who had the simple task of winning in San Marino and Ukraine who strolled to a 6-0 win in Andorra.

We now know that the notable absentees at the world cup will include Sweden, Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey, Croatia and Norway.

Casualties

There will also be some high level casualties in the European play-offs that will now be contested between Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, Russia, Bosnia, Ukraine, France and Republic of Ireland.

Many of the usual suspects will be in South Africa though and they will all be at the top of the bookies list of favourites. Brazil, Argentina, Holland, Italy and others including one or two of the African countries such as Ghana and the Ivory Coast will all feature heavily in the betting. No doubt in England, England will be installed as one of the favourites. I don’t suppose they will be anywhere else in the world!

Success

All of those countries have a real chance of success but at this stage it is very difficult to look past the current European champions, Spain. After their great win at Euro 2008 they have gone from strength to strength.

In their qualifying campaign Spain have won all ten of their games. They have scored twenty-eight goals and conceded just five. Their group was no more or less difficult than any of the others and included challenging teams such as Bosnia, Turkey and Belgium. They finished their campaign last night with an away trip to second placed Bosnia and blew them away in a 5-2 win. Alvaro Negrado came into the Spanish team for that game up front and scored twice. He only played because of injury to David Villa and Fernando Torres who are two of the best strikers in the world right now.

Win

It will be great to see who gets through the play-offs and it will be a fascinating tournament next year. There have already been many twists and turns and there are many more to come. Despite that, I still think Spain will win it.