It's the Soccer Super Friends!!! (No? Just me? OK.)
Important Announcement for Pick ‘Em Challenge Participants: Group play concludes on Friday! That means you have between the close of Friday’s 2:30 pm matches (usually around 5 pm ET) and the start of the first second round match at 10 AM Saturday morning to make your pick for that game. (If you oversleep, don’t worry — you can still pick all the remaining knockout round matches until the time the match starts. You just won’t get points for that first game.)
That said, the standings are very close as we head into the last few days of group play, so much so that my original plan to do a top 5 got a bit complicated (point totals are through Tuesday’s games):
Games Mistress, 22 pts
A. Hensch, 17 pts
four people tied at 16 pts
thistlewarrior, 15 pts
three people tied at 14 pts
Now that we’re about to lose the trusty “draw” pick that has served me so well in the opening round, I bet we’ll start to see some shuffling in the standings.
While you contemplate knockout round picking strategy, here are some pictures of Benny Feilhaber, who I unconscionably left out of the US pictures in the Group C preview. My only defense is that the FIFA photostream was surprisingly lacking in good pictures of him, so he didn’t catch my eye.
Um, he has now.
Ladies... 