Saturday, 7 December 2013

2014 FIFA World Cup draw: England get tough group

England will play Italy, Uruguay and Costa Rica in a tough Group D at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Roy Hodgson's men open their campaign against Italy in the Amazonian city of Manaus on 15 June in the only World Cup game which kicks off at 02:00 BST.

England take on Uruguay on 19 June and play Costa Rica five days later.

So to summarise we got about as tough a draw, with as tough a schedule that we could have got and Greg Dyke’s gesture when the draw was made, while not the best thing for the chairman of the FA to be caught doing, was definitely appropriate as we are the third best team in our group and we will in all likeliness be exiting at the group stages.

We have to play Italy in the middle of the jungle, 1,777 miles from our chosen base in Rio, where it’s 30C and 80% humidity, so the players will spend 90 minutes chasing Italian shadows as they will no doubt do to us what they did at the Euros and pass us to death.


Then Suarez will terrorise our back four and leave us playing for pride against Costa Rica, who we’ll no doubt scrape a 1-0 win against, but at least if it does go to form and we do get knocked out after two games then I can enjoy the knock-out stages and won’t have to worry about us taking a shellacking like we did against Germany in South Africa. Bring it on!

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