In reply to: Or they haven’t watched Saudi Arabia posted by miamioh_irishfan
It’s hard to accumulate the necessary points playing only friendlies
Prior to the start of Euro qualifying it looks like they were #38
I did hear some "experts" opine that Russia is really bad, but their WC performance does not match that assessment.
quite as diligent as the Olympics was in looking for performance enhancing products in the Russian sports program. Not, that the Olympics didn't try to look the other way as much as they could.
But every team should play a hell of a lot better at home than otherwise expected.