A shattered England will be praying for a lucky break at the preliminary draw for the 2010 World Cup tomorrow after seeing their Euro 2008 dreams crushed.
With the pairings and groups for the first stage of European qualifying being decided in Durban, South Africa, the hapless English will be desperate to avoid the traditional big guns to ease their passage to the showpiece event.
Forced to watch next year's Euros from home after failing to get the point they needed against Croatia on Wednesday, England have until August next year to sort themselves out before World Cup qualifying starts.
First and foremost they need a coach after Steve McClaren was dumped, with Aston Villa manager Martin O'Neill regarded as the best-placed candidate.
The Europeans face a different format than at previous World Cups, with 53 teams split into nine groups, eight of six teams and one of five.
The nine group winners will automatically qualify with the best eight runners up playing off for the last four tickets to South Africa.
UEFA President Michel Platini welcomed the changes.
"It's a good compromise solution, because I wasn't really happy with the format for the last qualifying competition with groups of seven and eight teams," he said.
As well as England, defending champions Italy, and powerhouses Germany and France will be in the draw.
Twenty teams from Asia will also be in the hat tomorrow in what promises to be a glitzy affair, led by seeds Australia, South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Japan, as the pairings for their third round are decided.
Like England, Australia, South Korea, and Iran are currently without coaches, while Japan is waiting to see whether Ivica Osim recovers from a serious stroke that sent him to hospital last week.
They will be split into five groups of four with the winners and runners-up progressing to round four. The continent has four automatic places to play for with the fifth ranked team challenging Oceania's best side for a fifth berth.
Forty-eight countries from Africa will be watching intently with the draw having added interest because the fixtures double as 2010 African Nations Cup qualifiers.
Countries from the region will be split into 12 groups of four with winners and the best eight runners-up advancing to a third round where they will play off to be one of five continental representatives.
The North, Central and Caribbean zone has 35 teams in contention for three places, with the US and Mexico favorites to go through to the tournament from June 11 to July 11 in nine South African cities.
Exempt from the draw are South America, whose qualifiers are already under way in a home-and-away league format, and Oceania, whose preliminary competition began with the South Pacific Games in August.
Once the 32 teams for the finals are decided, the draw for the World Cup proper will be held in December 2009.
For South Africa, the draw tomorrow is a chance to show the world it can properly organize and pull off what will be its first real World Cup test.
Concerns have been voiced about stadium construction amid recent strikes by workers, with the last one, in Nelspruit, only resolved on Thursday as thousands of delegates and journalists began arriving for the draw.
A workers' strike also halted construction at a stadium in Cape Town earlier this year.
But organizers are confident that everything is on schedule and that tomorrow's preliminary draw will illustrate the country's organizational skills.
"We will not fail on the delivery of stadiums on time," said chief executive of the local organizing committee Danny Jordaan. "We hope that if there are any doubting thomases, then after Sunday they will only be thomases."
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier