World Cup 2006 second round
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006
Now we can start to see which teams that have the potential to win the trophy even though many of the teams that already are through to the the round of 16 without playing other big teams yet.
Germany and Ecuador have won both matches, but they haven’t played any good teams yet. The final match in group A will give us a hunch if they have what it takes. England vs Sweden in group B will also give us more answers to how far the English team can go.
Argentina has continued to play brilliant football when they crushed Serbia 6-0 and this time they didn’t stop when they got the lead. As Holland also has won both their matches in the same group Côte d’Ivoire which has played open and entertaining football is already out.
Spain has played two good matches and won them with ease, but we will probably not see how good they are before playing better teams in the round of 16. There they could well run into the French team which haven’t .
Portugal, Brazil, England are ready for the next level without doing much more than needed to win their matches.
In the last round in the preliminary matches we finally get some big teams against each others like Argentina - Holland, Italy - Czech which will decide who will meet who later on in the cup rounds. This is the latest match teams can afford to rest before every match need to be won.
So who are the hottest candidates to go all the way after round 2? At the moment I think Argentina, Germany, Brazil, Spain has the potential. Holland, Portugal, England and Italy should be considered outsiders at the moment.