Again, a huge THANK YOU to Dok for fixing the Clone function! You can call it laziness. I prefer to call it efficiency. Either way, I can now crank these out and be ahead of the game.

While Hippo may choose to ignore this year’s tournament to be held in the USA, México, and Canadá for purely spiteful reasons (no judgement here, we salute spite!), I maintain that international competitions like the just concluded Olympics and the World Cup are the last opportunities for people to get out of their bubbles and realize there is a beautiful world out there full of people that don’t let politics get in the way of enjoying their lives.

With that said, let’s continue with our group previews, shall we? A heads up: I will not be going in alphabetical order. I will tackle first the groups that have been already defined as there are still some intercontinental qualifications games to be played.

Tonight’s group is Group J!

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Team Comparison

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Group Schedule

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Best picture that I found on the first page of Google Image Search using “Hot [country] babes” as a search term

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Actual Sport Preview

Argentina

Argentina is the current #2 team in the world even though they are the current champions. The reason for this is that Lionel Messi is another four years older and plays in Miami. The rest of the team is good, but it seems everything runs through him. They will live and die based on how he performs.

The team captured the top spot in CONMEBOL qualifying, as expected, but some results were surprising. They gave up points to teams they usually never give up points to. Luckily, Brasil performed historically badly during qualifying, so the spotlight was not on Argentina. It will be in the World Cup and the pressure of being the defending champions will be strong

Austria

Austria is back in the World Cup after a long absence. Their last World Cup was in 1998. This was partly attributable to having a relatively easy group in qualifying as Romania and Bosnia were the toughest rivals. Even with adding Herzegovina, the Bosnians couldn’t beat the Austrians.

It is really a mystery as to why Germany is so good at football while Austria, who is right next door and shares a common language (although they have different dialects), is not. Having been to both countries, I believe it is because the Austrians are a lot more relaxed about life. If you lose a match it’s okay because you live in a mountain paradise.

Algeria

Algeria has to be PISSED that France has taken all of their best players. It’s colonialism all over again. That’s not to say that there isn’t enough talent left over to make a formidable team. The problem is that they would be almost unstoppable if they could have some of the players that have decided to play for France instead of Algeria.

The goal, of course, is for Algeria to get second place in the group and advance to the knockout stages. They do have the talent to do it. In every international competition, the goal is to play France and beat France.

Jordan

The Jordanian national team is actually pretty good despite their lowly rating. They are not world-beaters by any stretch of the imagination, but it is well within their capability to beat either Austria or Algeria.

Their match against Algeria in NoCal will be a rare World Cup matchup between Arab countries, so there is an extra level of motivation there. In fact, it’s their most important game. If they get a result there, they may catch an Argentinian team resting their players in the last match after having already qualified and could sneak into the knockout rounds.

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Predicted Group Finish

• Argentina
• Algeria
• Jordan
• Austria

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Things to look forward to in the Group Stage

• Argentina looking deceptively good in the group stage and setting themselves up for a massive collapse in the knockout rounds.
• The many Austria/Australia jokes/boners.
• Second place in the group being decided on the last match day.

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Final Thoughts

I actually had to Google “hot Jordanian babes” instead of “hot Jordan babes” because the only results I got on the front page were Instagram models named Jordan and photos of girls wearing Jordan shoes. Our country is a mess.

Outside of Argentina, this is probably one of the most even groups. The battle for second will be fierce. Speaking of, I said “Depends” on the column indicating whether Argentina is cool because there are so many cool things about Argentina and yet so many of their people are assholes. It depends on what you choose to focus on.