{"id":5742,"date":"2026-06-26T22:36:38","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T22:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/?p=5742"},"modified":"2026-06-26T22:36:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T22:36:38","slug":"world-cup-2026-why-are-the-underdogs-doing-so-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/?p=5742","title":{"rendered":"World Cup 2026: Why are the underdogs doing so well?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">And lastly, if teams are going to get results against strong opposition, they ideally need to pose their own threat on the ball.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">South Africa took 14 shots to South Korea&#8217;s seven in their match while only having 31% of the ball. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Their ability to get the ball up the pitch, in a more deliberate manner, rather than simply playing long from the goalkeeper was central to this. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Underdogs that have done well have often played short from goal-kicks, drawing pressure from the bigger nations who are more inclined to press high, before chipping it into clusters of players in space.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">We have seen the likes of Cape Verde, Iraq, and South Africa all use short goal-kicks, interestingly positioning players far from one another.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The idea is that by creating large distances between players, opponents who want to press man-for-man have to run big distances to close the opponent down. In the time that this takes, defenders can look to find midfielders and attackers in space. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And lastly, if teams are going to get results against strong opposition, they ideally need to pose their own threat&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5743,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}