FIFA World Cup 2018 Russia - Group Draw

The live draw for the FIFA World Cup 2018 held at the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow, started at 2100 hrs IST. and was completed in under 20 minutes. Not that it was expected to be a long drawn out process. Former England forward Gary Linekar, the Golden Boot winner at Mexico 1986, conducted the draw along with Maria Komandnaya, a Russian sports journalist. Eight former greats of the game were on-stage to assist with selecting the teams from the 4 pots and then selecting teh positions in each group. They were Laurent Blanc (France), Gordon Banks (England), Cafu (Brazil), Fabio Cannavaro (Italy), Diego Forlan (Uruguay), Diego Maradona (Argentina), Carlos Puyol (Spain) and Nikita Simonyan (Russia).

The teams were seeded into 4 pots with Russia and the top 7 ranked teams forming pot 1 and following the FIFA-CocaCola rankings to fill up the remaining 3 pots.

32 teams slotted into 4 pots of 8 teams each

The rules while slotting the teams into the group were that there would not be more than one team from each zone in each group except for the European zone where there would be a maximum of 2 European teams in each group.

Below are the 8 groups of the FIFA WC 2018 Russia. 

FIFA World Cup 2018 - Draw Results - 8 groups

Group B seems to be most likely to be considered a Group of Death for this edition of the World Cup with Portugal and Spain featuring in the group opener and the presence of Morocco who performed quite strongly during qualifying as well as the Islamic Republic of Iran to round off the group. Though there are already claims of Germany having a tougher draw in Group F with a counter claim of Argentina facing a tricky group in Group D.

Is it possible that maybe, just maybe, the Englishmen would have taken some inspiration from their U-19 boys who lifted the trophy in India?

Lest we forget...

It was in the evening of 23rd July 2008, in the small town of Murmansk, Russia. Our ship had been in the port for a couple of days and I was out with the deck cadet exploring the town.

This memorial caught my eye. I was able to find a young man who was kind enough to try and explain that it was a war memorial. My lack of understanding of Russian was the culprit here.

What was most striking about the memorial was the fresh bouquet of flowers present. This, the young man could explain saying that there would always be someone who would place flowers on that memorial. It was their way of showing they cared and they remembered those who had fallen.

Cut back to today.
13th December.
Anniversary of the attack on the Parliament.

All 12 of our politicians turned up.

This, from a whole assembly of politicians who had just a couple of days ago been unified in their voice to state that they would not forget the fallen soldiers.

Or was that ONLY for the 26/11 fallen men?

Yeah. We remember our dead. Sure.