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snjevka t1_j0o8fdl wrote

How does it make sense that Croatia's chances were greater before the game with Japan than before the next game with Brasil?

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Jonathan-Shimshoni t1_j0oelg7 wrote

They drew that game 0-0 against Belgium with a lot of luck and didn’t show much quality

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zebulon99 t1_j0pbwvx wrote

Yeah but belgium is on paper really good, i think they were ranked top 5 before the wc, so a draw against them should be good no?

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Jonathan-Shimshoni t1_j0pde1s wrote

Rankings don’t mean anything.

Belgium were not playing good and just lost 2-0 to Morocco.

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sneer0101 t1_j0pt014 wrote

Fifa rankings literally mean nothing. They're calculated in a bizzare way.

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mfb- t1_j0q2yr3 wrote

Brazil won and was known as next opponent. Sure, they were strong favorites against South Korea anyway, but Croatia's chance to win overall would have relied on pretty unlikely outcomes anyway and an upset victory of South Korea would have helped a lot (Croatia beating Brazil was the other unlikely option, of course). Argentina and the Netherlands won their games, too, so the semifinal was guaranteed to have a strong opponent as well. Add a weak performance against Japan to the mix.

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HucHuc t1_j0rvltl wrote

Bookmakers don't care about strength of teams, but about money bet on each side. If you see 5:1 odds for team A against team B, chances are team B has 5x more money bet on it already. Apparently Croatia had less bets as a percentage of all remaining teams after the game with Japan.

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