Ok so now England bombed out of the World Cup, and our brothers and sisters never made it there, it's time we look towards Euro 2012.

Qualifying begins in September and the groups can be found here: Euro 2012 Qualifying Groups

England: Switzeland, Bulgaria, Wales, Montenegro
Scotland: Spain, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Liechtenstein
Wales: (see England group)
Northern Ireland: Italy, Serbia, Slovenia, Estonia, Faroe Islands
Our friends in the green Isle: Russia, Slovakia, FYR Macedonia, Armenia, Andorra

So, an England v Wales derby.

Scotland. Hm. Tricky. Looks like the crucial matches will be with the Czechs.

Norther Ireland. Tricky if Serbia play like they did against the Germans. Mind you the Italians aren't on top form.

Ireland look like they have a great chance of qualifying so long as the refs don't allow their opponents to use hands as well as feet.

Hopefully Capello will stay for England and get the new blood in that he's been talking about. We need tactically astute players. not necessarily the most individually talented. Two World Cups and no goals for Rooney suggests we need a different approach.

Other groups of interest. Well the Germans have Turkey (always going to a big match) and a local derby with Austria. The Dutch and Swedes in a group together and there's a derby in the offing for Sweden with Finland (big interest in my house ).

Time for a sports forum?

Quite possibly.

We're gonna win this one for sure!

Oh FFS

You know you love it really!

*runs*

England have got to be favourites, surely?

Oh, no. Not again…

No, judging by the world cup performances, I think it might be Brazil or Argentina for this one...

The thing is, unless we compartmentalise everything down to very specific components, any forum will still contain threads I don't want to read alongside those I don't. If you move the sports seperately, I'd imagine a fair number of users will still only read certain threads in it. I wouldn't be that interested in any toe-ball threads, for example, but would be keen to follow the 6 Nations and F1 threads. If I make a comment about rugby in a thread (I'm thinking The Random Poop thread) in The Meeting Place am I in the wrong place? I think TMP needs to be kept as an "everything (within reason) welcome", with the proviso that you'll get better technical answers if you make use of one of the technical forums. If you make a comment about full-frame Canon sensors in TMP, for example, you'd miss out on the wisdom of Mr. Miners.

If we remove Sport from TMP, then they'll still be threads I want to read, and threads I want to ignore, but they'll be split across multiple forums. I have very little interest in the (seemingly short-lived) Big Brother threads, but I do have follow and post in the Doctor Who thread, so Television (which is another popular category in TMP) being moved to a seperate forum would give similar results. I think what I'm saying is that there'll always be threads a given person wants to and doesn't want to read within any given category, and moving these categories into their own forums only causes them to have to view more forums before mentally filtering the threads. Can people not accept that other folks will have interests different to their own? Personally I couldn't care one jot about toe-ball, but it doesn't mean I think the threads should be moved - I just ignore/skim/read if someone "interesting" posts.

There's an argument to be made for a sports section in the Interests forum. Perhaps it's a good time to begin a discussion about it.

Main threads on such things as world cups, premier leagues, rugby, cricket, F1, etc, could go there. That wouldn't preclude anyone posting random stuff in other forums. I don't think we need to get that fussy about where sports stuff goes.

Equally, if the majority of those interested prefer to keep such threads in TMP, that's fine. I know I don't have to read it.

Let's at least start putting threads in the appropriate sections that we already have, before we start making new sections that can subsequently be ignored as thread after thread is inappropriately thrown into TMP.



:edited to add the above smiley.

Actually, he might be on to something there. Is it possible to implement an 'ignore this thread' function, so you can effectively 'hide' threads you're not interested in in TMP?

Re: the actual qualifying - given the groups and (in England's case at least) the paucity of talent to replace those who will probably retire / be hounded out by the press from the current squad, I find it hard to believe any of the home nations will qualify. Wales probably have the best crop of young players but I think it may be a tournament too soon for them.

That'd be a first! (8-p)