Sunday, June 6, 2010

My Favored Team & The Group of Death

Honduras and their Group H.

H is for Honduras.

The Group:
- Spain
- Honduras
- Chile
- Switzerland

The secret way I went about looking at Group winners and runners up was to pick out efficiencies because of the variance in the number of World Cup appearances from team to team. So here is what I went with:

Wins per WC
Win+Tie per WC
Pts p/Game (3 for win, 1 for tie)
Goals p/Game
Goals Against p/Game
Margin of Victory

I ranked each team in the group 1-4 in each area then tallied up the totals. Lowest score a team could get is 6 (best in each category). Worst score possible is 24 (ranked fourth in each of the six categories). The two teams with the lowest score out of my six efficiency ratings moves past the Group stage to the Round of 16.

Group H to me is the so called Group of Death. Not because all the teams are from traditional powers, but because the balance between Honduras, Chile, and Switzerland. Here is how my efficiencies (reminder: each of my six cat ranked 1 to 4 then aggregate) came out for Group H:

7: Spain
17: Honduras
18: Chile
18: Switzerland

The standard deviation there is 5.35, lower then any other grouping. Meaning; in the world of "what you do when you get to the WC"... the most competitive.

There were two groups that went 1 through 4 in each of my categories. What this means is that there should be clear cut Winner and Runner up out of the GS:

Group B:
6: Argentina
12: Nigeria
18: Korea Republic
24: Greece

Group F:
6: Italy
12: Slovakia
18: Paraguay
24: New Zealand

Looking at the United States chances in Group C using this same ranking system, Algeria has the upper hand, even without the continental endorphin boost.

Group C:
6: England
13: Algeria
17: USA
24: Slovenia

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I woke up early today for no good reason. As I sat on the can I looked at one of a few WC magazines I picked up. I open to a page and on it had a very large blue H. Los Catrachos will make it through...

Unknown said...

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/world_soccer/12/01/honduras/index.html

Unknown said...

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/story/_/id/5264881/ce/us/honduras-government-workers-get-time-watch-matches?cc=5901&ver=us