International Round Up

By John P
October 10 2005

Scotland, Wales and Nigeria fail to qualify for the World Cup, however England qualify and there is an outside chance for the Rep of Ireland. The good news is that all of the Everton players involved in the international games have remained injury free.

Weir says no to retirement after scotlands failure to qualify.
A home defeat by Belarus, along with Norways result against Moldova, resulted in the Scots being knocked out. David Weir, 35, insisted that he would not hang up his boots and is now looking forward to the next game midweek against Slovenia.

“I would never say that. I will just look to the next game and hopefully try and get picked for that.

“We need to rebound from that result against Belarus. It's not sunk in yet. We are disappointed about the performance as well as the score.”

“The early goal set us back, it shook us and it took time to recover. We had a go after the interval but it never happened for us.

“But we can't get down about it. We can still go out on a high against Slovenia on Wednesday.”

cahill plays for Australia in friendly.
The club vs country debate picked up towards the end of last week as Moyes wanted Cahill to be rested for the friendly game against Jamaica. However, Gus has taken the points raised by Moyes over the fact that Tim has played football with no break, for 2 and a half years and used Cahill as a substitute in the dying minutes of the game. The game ended up 5-0 to the Socceroo's.

Yobo home next summer
Defender Joseph Yobo will be home next summer as Nigeria also failed to qualify. Although winning 5-1 against Zimbabwe, Angola finished 2nd in the group beating Rwanda clinching the final spot in the table.

Valente in come back
Portugal came back from a 1-0 deficit to Liechtenstein to win 2-1 and claim a place in Euro 2004.

Wales out on a high
simon Davies scored in a thrilling game which ended 3-2 against Northern Ireland, although winning the game was not enough as Wales knew they had failed to qualify before kick off.

Kilbane - history in the making
Killa made history as he now holds the record for most consecutive appearances in Competitive International games for Brian Kerr's side and with their 1-0 win over Cyprus there is still an outside chance of the Irish qualifying for Germany.