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...world woke up on Thursday finally knowing the complete, 32-team field for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa next summer. (The last team to qualify was Uruguay, which drew with Costa Rica Wednesday night in Montevideo, but had beaten the Costa Ricans over the weekend.) On Dec. 4, the teams will be seeded and sorted by lottery into eight groups by the sport's international body, FIFA. Then, it's only 203 days until the fun begins. Here are five reasons to get excited about the opening kick...
...rise of Africa African soccer had its first big moment two decades ago when a little known Cameroon side dazzled its way into the quarterfinals of the 1990 World Cup in Italy. Before then, Sub-Saharan Africa hadn't made much of an impression on the global soccer stage beyond the occasional embarrassing episode, such as when a Zaire defender tried to pre-empt a Brazil free kick by booting the ball away in the 1974 tournament. But since the early 1990s, the stature of African football has only grown: top African players are now superstars in the world...
...star power. The dark horse of the African field is Algeria, which qualified only after a tense playoff match with bitter rival Egypt on Wednesday in Sudan following outbursts of violence by both teams' fans in Cairo and Algiers. The victory has catapulted Algeria into its first World Cup since the 1980s, when a "golden generation" of Algerian players upset West Germany in the first round of the 1982 tournament and qualified for the 1986 competition only to bow out early. The current crop of Algerian players, many of whom were raised in France and play for clubs there, possess...
...good teams have good stories Take New Zealand, probably the worst team heading to the World Cup. While the country has excelled at cricket and rugby - its "All Blacks" team is a perennial powerhouse in the latter - it has had far less success in soccer. The New Zealand team traveling to South Africa may feel uncomfortable not just because they're known as the "All Whites." In a tournament filled with millionaire, jet-setting athletes, the bulk of the Kiwi squad is made up of journeymen who toil in obscurity in lower-tier leagues in Europe and others who until...
Read "North Korea Wipes Out Iran (from the World Cup...