Awaiting the play-off draw: Bosnia vs. Portugal

With only a few hours leading up to the draw, conventional wisdom goes something like this: everyone in their right mind would hope to draw Greece, seeing as, although they’re by no means a bad team, they’re undoubtedly the worst of the four. As prospective opponents, the remaining three rank from bad to worse, but somehow most would agree that Portugal is the least of three evils, and particularly if they end up without Ronaldo. No one is really putting much stock into the talk about France’s lack of cohesion and management troubles, because no one is eager to place our fortunes against the likes of Ribery, Henry and Benzema. Russia on the other hand may have a less spectacular roster, but they have arguably the most brilliant manager in world football and few would fancy playing away in Moscow mid-November. On top of all this, the standard FIFA conspiracy theories and talk about hot and cold balls is abound, with even the most skeptical bracing themselves for at least a heavy dose of favoritism from the referees (towards our opponents of course).

And I largely agree with the conventional wisdom. A draw against Greece would be fantastic, a draw against Portugal acceptable and a draw against either France or Russia serious trouble. Once again, I don’t think anyone is fooling themselves into thinking that Greece would be easy – they’re a very difficult side to play against. But between Gekas/Amanatidis and Džeko/Ibišević, well… I know which Bundesliga duo I would choose. We’d need for everything to fall into place and a fair bit of luck, but it would be the opportunity of a generation.

I’ll try to wake up early tomorrow and give my reaction to the actual draw.

Edit 1: And I’m awake. Ok… let’s do a live-blog kind of thing.

Edit 2: Sepp Blatter = dodgy uncle

Edit 3: Ok… France out of the way. So far so good.

Edit 4: And so Portugal it is. Could’ve been better, could’ve been worse. At least we have the deciding game at home. I think this is doable.

p.s. For anyone wondering what the hell happened to me (all two of you then), my computer with the password(s) for this blog had to go in for repairs. It was just my luck that Best Buy needed a little over 5 weeks to replace the keyboard. Maybe I could’ve figured out some round about way to keep on posting, but it was hard to motivate myself with a full load at college. Either way, the computer is back and so am I.