France’s World Cup qualifying match against Serbia on Wednesday suddenly looks a lot trickier following its humiliating opening loss to Austria.
While Italy and England are also among the sides looking to improve upon disappointing first performances in European qualifying, at least they are coming off wins as they prepare to take on Georgia and Croatia, respectively.
There’s no such comfort for a France team that is now desperate for a victory as it tries to catch up with surprise group seven leaders Lithuania.
Defender Patrice Evra is among those who fear another defeat would seriously hurt the team’s chances of reaching a fourth straight World Cup in 2010.
“If we don’t beat Serbia, there will be doubts over our qualification,” Evra said.
Coach Raymond Domenech was more sanguine about his team’s chances, but knows there are changes to be made for the match in Saint-Denis.
Despite the experience of playing at the highest club level, the likes of Arsenal’s William Gallas and AS Roma’s Philippe Mexes struggled against Austria, which managed two first-half goals from free kicks and a second-half penalty for Saturday’s 3-1 win.
“Qualification is achieved over a series of matches. There is one coming on Wednesday against Serbia and we will have to be ready,” Domenech said. “We will have to fight until the end.”
In other of the day’s 25 European matches, Romania has the ideal chance to get over the trauma of its 3-0 home defeat to Lithuania when it travels to the Faeroe Islands.
“It was a shameful evening, to forget as soon as possible,” said Cosmin Contra, who will probably captain Romania again because Christian Chivu will join Adrian Mutu and Razvan Rat injured on the sidelines.
Austria is at Lithuania in the other group match.
World Cup champion Italy, meanwhile, hosts Georgia three days after needing an injury-time goal from Antonio Di Natale to win 2-1 at lowly Cyprus in Group 8.
England is at Croatia, where it suffered a traumatic defeat in qualification for this year’s European Championship, and would have hoped for a more convincing warmup than its 2-0 win at Andorra on Saturday.
While Croatia, which also won at Wembley to reach Euro 2008, was comfortably disposing of Kazakhstan 3-0, England opened its group six efforts with a disjointed performance and needed two second-half goals from substitute Joe Cole to beat No.186-ranked Andorra.
“I know it’s a football cliche, but they put 10 men behind the ball and stopped us playing,” Cole said. “But we still didn’t move the ball as well as we’d like to have done. The confidence of the team was a bit low.”
It could be even lower after the match in Zagreb, where England lost 2-0 two years ago, partly because of an own-goal and goalkeeping error by Paul Robinson.
Cole should replace Stewart Downing in the starting lineup, even though coach Fabio Capello said he was unhappy with some of the midfielder’s positional play.
The Netherlands sat out Saturday’s round of matches and, after a 2-1 friendly loss to Australia, needs a bright start to group nine against Iceland to give them confidence of clinching one of the spots at the 2010 tournament in South Africa.
Each of the nine group winners advance, with eight second-place teams entering playoffs for another four places
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