Agree about the timing being cra*p

They've done the right thing at the wrong time. Don't know why they didn't announce it earlier - its something you'd clearly expect them to want to do (and the rest of the competition is seeded so it wouldn't have been particularly controversial)

What you base seedings on is difficult. With such small groups basing it solely on the qualifying tournament is probably a bit dodgy since teams are playing totally different opponents and some groups might be tougher than others. Not sure exactly how they are basing it but I thought the rankings were pretty heavily weighted towards recent years (i.e. if results from 20 years are included they must amount to a very tiny elemnt of the ranking)

Posted By: mr carra, Oct 12, 09:13:00