The long, long Silk Road to South Africa

Another night of thrilling (i.e. boring) World Cup qualification for England fans to endure. It seems that my post earlier in the week, about long complicated trips to away games might have been a bit hasty. Thanks to the strike by London's tube workers, whose union had the bare-faced cheek to demand a 5% pay rise slap-bang in the middle of a global recession, Wembley was only two-thirds full. Even the god-forsaken corporate tier of the stadium looked bare in places and now the FA will have to stump up refunds for those punters who decided to take the equally grim option of watching the game on ITV.

England's win tonight means that they are a mere three points away from ensuring participation in South Africa next year, but despite their perfect qualifying record thus far, other teams have beaten England to the first berths. In fact, the Asian qualifying pools appear, at first glance, to be all but sewn-up, with Japan, South Korea and everyone's favourite Asian team, Australia, successfully filling three of the four qualifying places.

But digging a little deeper, there is still plenty to play for. The final automatic qualification spot will be fought over between Korea DPR, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Iranians have recent World Cup pedigree on their side, but only a win against table topping South Korea and a draw between the other two sides would realistically see them through. That means it should be a straight shoot-out between Korea DPR and Saudi Arabia. The Koreans have a slight goal difference advantage and won the reverse fixture, but the Saudis will be playing on home soil, which I would expect will give them just enough advantage to sneak through.

Even then, it's not all over though. The team finishing third in this group will enter a two-legged play-off match against either Bahrain or Uzbekistan, who will be fighting it out for the third place spot in their group behind the Japanese and Aussies. Bahrain will be strong favourites and they'll be keen to secure their play-off spot so they can lay to rest the demons they'll still have about losing the 2006 play-off against Trinidad and Tobago.

And still it's not over, because the winner of the play-off between the two third place sides will still not have done enough to merit a place in the finals. They will then have to enter another two legged play-off, this time against Oceania group victors, New Zealand. The winners of that tie will then find themselves packing their bags for the summer tournament. Phew! And if one of Bahrain, Korea DPR or Uzbekistan makes it all the way to the finals via these play-offs, they will have played a massive 20 games in order to get there. New Zealand, on the other hand, could get there after just eight matches (including a 2-0 defeat to Fiji). Hardly seems fair.

By the way, it was great to see the likes of Greaves, Flowers, Springett and Armfield finally pick up World Cup winners medals today, having been non-playing squad members in the 1966 final. And it was great to see Greavsie back on the box, delivering a damning blow to the nation of Andorra, firstly by forgetting who England were playing against and then by declaring that the opposition were 'rubbish' and insisting that the team of '66 could step out for the second half and beat them. That kind of punditry is worthy of a medal of its own!