Football Daily | World Cup playoffs mean it’s crunch time for Gattuso, Bellamy and Potter

World Cup playoffs mean it’s crunch time for Gattuso, Bellamy and Potter Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now! THE SEMI FINAL HURDLE It’s Geopolitics World Cup playoff day, dear reader, and Gibraltar are playing Latvia in a winner-takes-all clash. Sadly, for football romantics, that game is the first leg of a Nations League promotion/relegation playoff. Uefa’s scheduling feels a bit cruel, like making some poor flunky do the graveyard shift while Bacchanalia Revisited takes place on the floor above. And what a party it’s going to be. Sure, the process of qualifying has become so convoluted that even Bobby Seagull doesn’t fully understand it, but now we’ve reached the stage where everything is terrifyingly simple. There are no second chances any more, and the only guarantee is of thrills, spills and bellyaches. Sixteen European teams are involved in Thursday’s semi-finals; by Tuesday night, four will be on their way to the GWC and 12 will be wondering whether they can still legitimately cherish the memories they made en route to the playoffs. Northern Ireland drew the barely perceptible straw – Gennaro Gattuso’s Italy in Bergamo – and need their most famous away victory since they won in West Germany in 1983. Their best chance is probably to play on Italian nerves. Almost unbelievably – Football Daily even broke the habit of a lifetime by double checking something, even though we know it’s true – Italy have not qualified for a World Cup finals since 2014. The last time they failed to qualify before that, in 1958, they were knocked out by … Northern Ireland. What could it all mean? Eff all, obviously, that was 68 years ago. The winners of that game face a playoff final away to either Wales or Bosnia and Herzegovina, who meet in Cardiff . Since succeeding Robert Page in 2024, Craig Bellamy has proved you should never judge a man by his golf swing. Bellamy has emerged as one of the most intriguing, original managers in British football, and his intrepid te...