France have it easy

Anyone looking at the FIFA rankings will know there are a lot of anomalies in them, but if you take FIFA’s list at face value and put their ranking against each country in each group for this World Cup, then add up the totals you get some interesting results.

If we take the group with the lowest total as being the toughest group and the highest total being the easiest group, Group E, USA-Italy-Czech-Ghana comes out as the Group of Death with a score of 69.

The group people were calling the GofD, Group C, Argentina-Holland-Serbia-Ivory Coast turns out to be the third toughest on rankings with a score of 85.

France are loving life. They’re in the eighth ranked and easiest group, Group G, with a grand total of 132 ranking points.

The full results are
1. Group E USA-Italy-Czech-Ghana…..69 ranking points
2.Group F Brazil-Croatia- Australia-Japan…..82 ranking points
3.Group C Argentina-Holland-Serbia-Ivory Coast…..85 ranking points
4. Group D Mexico-Iran-Angola-Portugal…..96 ranking points
5.Group H Spain- Ukraine-Tunisia-Saudi Arabia…..106 ranking points
6.Group B England-Paraguay-Trinidad-Sweden…..107 ranking points
7.Group A Germany-Costa Rica-Poland-Ecuador…..111 ranking points
8.Group G France-Switzerland-S.Korea- Togo…..132 ranking points

All this probably means nothing, isn’t there a saying that goes something like ‘using maths you can make it possible for an elephant to wrap its tail around a daisy and hang off a cliff.’