The twitter world was all, well, atwitter today, when Jorge Ramos tweeted that CONCACAF was going to revert to the Hex. The retweets came hard and heavy.
The reason was apparently, was the lack of Fifa-sanctioned match dates (it is so much easier to say fechas fifas). Not the unsuccessful attempt to land that coveted 1/2 spot for Brasil2014, as most people expected.
Well, that doesn’t make any sense.
Last time around, the teams that qualified for the tournament played 18 matches. The three group stages that CONCACAF was considering will have totaled – that’s right – 18 matches. Qualifying for 2010 started two summers before the World Cup. FMF even had dates set aside this fall for possible qualifiers on their official calendar.
I thought the whole point of changing the qualifying format was to give a majority of the member nations a punchers chance to qualify. More than half of the confederation gets less than a handful of games before their dream ends. This newfangled qualifying, I thought, was supposed to keep hope alive at least until the beginning of 2013.
Alas, the Hex lives on (allegedly), and we all know what that means.
5 home games when it matters most.