Playing to come out of a group is an art in it of itself
It is a lot different than playing Head to head or playing in the hex.
Our performance in the Gold Cup was poor and we could not recover to come out of the group even though we had great expectations.
Our limited experience in group type play will hurt us.
Unless we are able to start strong and beat sweeden we will have problems because chasing the game will not help our defensive situation against paraguary or England.
Our Entire focus must be to find a way to pick up points against Sweeden and paraguary.
for group play you have to play from in front
We cannot come on strong like we did in the Hex
if we dont start strong it will be impossible to recover.
You're making a decent point, but you have it all back to front.
First of all, the Hex was a group. In fact, it is more of a group than the first round of the world cup
The times when we performed well in the Hex were the times when the games were almost identical to straight elimination games.
The world cup however is an elimination tournament. It is not a league, where the number of points determines your position at the end of the "season". The first round affords each team 3 games to avoid elimination.....after that it's single match elimination. The points system in the first round gives teams a little leverage to be able to play for a draw if need be, but for the most part, teams play for as many points as possible to minimize their chances of elimination. In very very very rare cases, a very tactical team may "intentionally" aim at 2nd place in a group to avoid meeting x or y....but that is an exception.
For teams like Trinidad, in the World Cup there is very little difference between group play and straight elimination. Every game for us will be like an elimination game. I don't think we're strong enough or tactically experienced enough to play for ties or position in our group.
The games that Trinidad played well in in the HEX, were do or die games which were almost identical to straight elimination games.......The argument that we're not tactically strong enough to do well in group play might be justified therefore the nature of the World Cup (all rounds) may actually work in our favour.
Our failure in the Gold Cup had nothing to do with our lack of group play experience. It had to do with our inability to play creative football without some of our key players.
