Intercontinental play-offs preview: Who will make WC in Qatar?
Australia or Peru, and New Zealand or Costa Rica – the last two spots at Qatar 2022 will be confirmed over the next two days.
In an ordinary World Cup year, we would either already be engrossed in the group stages or be a matter of days away from the big kick-off. But this is no ordinary World Cup year. We still have two of the 32 places to be confirmed for Qatar 2022, which is due to begin in November.
Tuesday's intercontinental play-off between Costa Rica and New Zealand will complete line-up, with their contest falling exactly four years to the day since Russia thrashed Saudi Arabia 5-0 in the opening game of the 2018 World Cup. Before that meeting, however, New Zealand's neighbours Australia face Peru in the penultimate play-off on Monday.
Both matches will give the victorious teams a vital taste of what it's like to play in Qatar, with the Ahmad bin Ali Stadium playing host to both winner-takes-all encounters.
Peruvian shamans are expectant
It will be a long day for any Australia fans hoping to catch the game before work – kick-off will be at 4am AEST. Those who do brave the early start will surely be doing so out of loyalty and hope, rather than expectation. The Socceroos' route through the Asian qualification phase was unconvincing to say the least. They scraped third place in the third round, finishing just a point ahead of Oman and seven adrift of Japan.
If it is Peru who make it, it will be just the second time they have ever qualified for successive World Cups, a remarkable achievement in itself given the country's domestic league is regarded as one of if not the weakest in South America at the moment: none of their four representatives in the Copa Libertadores this year claimed a single victory. And yet Ricardo Gareca ensured his team finished ahead of Colombia and Chile in qualifying. The much-vaunted Ecuador only registered two points more than Peru.
Los Ticos back from the back
New Zealand fans will have a similar conundrum to their Aussie counterparts. Do they get up excruciatingly early to endure their nail-biting contest with Costa Rica, or do they just try to sleep through it and get the result a few hours later? Either way, it's fair to expect a few more Costa Rican eyes to be on the game. The country's president Rodrigo Chaves has authorised an extra hour's lunch on Tuesday for public servants and private sector workers to allow fans to tune in.
The fact Costa Rica even made it this far is commendable given the difficult start they had to the third round of CONCACAF qualifying. After one win from their first seven matches, a 90th-minute winner by Gerson Torres in a 2-1 defeat of Honduras last November proved to be the turning point.
In that sense, this is almost certainly the biggest match New Zealand have played since beating Bahrain 1-0 over two legs in November 2009 to qualify for South Africa 2010. On that occasion they ended the World Cup as the only undefeated side after drawing all three of their group games. A rather trickier group awaits this time with Spain, Germany and Japan already in place, but New Zealand won't care in the slightest if they just get the chance to cause an upset.