Welcome to the seventeenth and final update of the World Cup 2022 ONS Superbru competition.

Croatia 2 Morocco 1

A agme that got off to a great start was in the end won by towards the end of the first half by Croatia. Morocco produced so many chances but didn’t have that clinical edge in front of goal. Morocco also made full use of their squad through injuries – and in the end ran out of gas. An entertaining game nonetheless and great to see both an emerging team in Morocco, breaking new ground and marvel at how a country of 4 million people can have the international success they have had.

In our competition we had six people get the 2-1; Gemma Keane, Owain Thomas, Ben Jones, John Hughes, Simon Humphries and Pete Lee.

Argentina 3* France 3

I can vaguely remember the ticker tape final of 1978, but this has to be the best final I have seen. Finals can be cagey affairs but Argentina looked like they were cruising until the 70th minute after a penalty and a second goal that was one-touch magic. At that point, France had not registered a single shot. But then Mbappe scored two to turn the game around. Ultimately, after the game went into extra time, for me it was justice that Argentina won on penalties, despite arguably France having more chances to win in extra time. Perhaps France were playing the dope on the rope trick? Anyway a classic.

In our pool, the final game saw no-one go for the 3-3, I was looking good with my 3-2 until Mbappe scored again! We had three 2-2’s though to register close points; Gemma Keane, Pete Lee and Andrew Walton.

Pool Results

In the final analysis, we saw some big changes in the leaderboard. Pete Reynolds held on to win by tiebreaker. Rules on that are provided below:

If players have the same score total, rank is determined by the higher number of correct match outcomes predicted (right winner or draw regardless of score), then higher number of exact scores, higher number of close scores and finally lower total closeness. Note that it’s not your total exact or close points that counts, it is how many instances of exact or close picks you have: so an exact counts as 1, not 3. Players still matching are tied for rank.

In the minor places, John Hughes leapt from 5th to 2nd, Pete Lee leapt six places into third and Mark Taylor came fourth. Despite hving 32 in the pool, one player was a DNS so we ended up with 31 people and a £155 prize fund allocated as follows: