66 tokyokie says:

June 11, 2019 at 5:24 pm

@–bd:

No mercy. With only 3 round robin games in the group, you need to grab those goals where you can find them since goal differential is usually the first tie breaker. With two of the four advancing, if a couple of teams go 1-1-1 in the group, the goal differential is the difference between 2nd place in the group and advancing compared to 3rd place and going home.

Case in point, the 1974 World Cup. Brazil, Yugoslavia, Scotland, and Zaire made up one of the groups. Brazil, Yugoslavia, and Scotland all tied when they play one another, and all three shut out Zaire. However, the Scots had the misfortune of playing Zaire first, and were satisfied with a 2-0 victory. But by the time Yugoslavia played Zaire, they’d already tied Brazil and knew that Brazil and Scotland had tied, so they laid a 9-0 thrashing on Zaire. Brazil played Zaire in the last match of group play and knew they merely needed to best Scotland’s goal total to advance, and accordingly, beat Zaire, 3-0. Scotland thus became the only undefeated side in the tournament but failed to advance.

72 MCA1 says:

June 11, 2019 at 5:31 pm

Forget the goal differential stuff – you can’t have a mercy rule in the World Cup, period. It’s the highest level of competition in the game. If there aren’t enough teams that can legitimately compete to hold a 24 team tournament without mockeries of the sport like a 13-0 finish (or 10-0 and 10-1 in the last WWC), that’s on FIFA. Don’t expand to 24 teams until there are.

Hours after President Trump declared in the White House Rose Garden that he doesn’t “do coverups,” his administration revealed that it had been hiding the death of a migrant girl at the border for the past eight months. On Thursday evening, CBS News reported that a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador died last September while under the care of the government. The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the death, which had not been previously disclosed.

HHS spokesman Mark Weber explained that the girl had a history of heart problems and was in a “medically fragile” state when she arrived at an Office of Refugee Resettlement facility last March. The girl’s name was not released, and it’s unclear why the death was not previously reported. “I have not seen any indication that the Trump administration disclosed the death of this young girl to the public or even to Congress,” Rep. Joaquín Castro (D-TX) told CBS. “And if that’s the case, they covered up her death for eight months, even though we were actively asking the question about whether any child had died or been seriously injured. We began asking that question last fall.”

At least seven children are known to have died in immigration custody since last year, after almost a decade in which no child reportedly died while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The string of cases continue to raise questions around the conditions in which migrant children are being kept at a time when a growing number of migrants, many of them Central American parents with children, are presenting themselves at the border to seek asylum.

Aside from the fact that children may have underlying health conditions, most are reaching the United States after arduous journeys during which they have had little access to clean shelter and proper provisions. Many are leaving impoverished and drought-stricken regions.

For the past year and a half, Dr. Eric Russell has been traveling from Houston to McAllen, Texas, every three months or so to volunteer at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center, a first stop for many asylum-seeking migrants who’ve been released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Rio Grande Valley.

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“I had a few adults that came who had high blood pressure, who had their blood pressure medications taken from them and, not surprisingly, their blood pressure was elevated,” Russell told Yahoo News. “There was a couple of adults that had diabetes that had their diabetes medicines taken from them, and wanted to come in because they were worried about their blood sugar. And, not surprisingly, their blood sugar was elevated.”

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“The mom came to the clinic because she was concerned that he was going to have a seizure,” said Russell. He wasn’t sure exactly how long they’d been in custody — “usually it's a matter of days,” he said, “but with seizure medicines, that’s enough.”