In-betweeners.

Day -941. WorldCup2018.

It's all pretty quiet on the international football front these days. Come March the Europeans will be gearing up for the next round of meaningless friendlies (or dreading them), where some players will be out injured because their club managers are worried about a sore pinky finger or tooth and other players will be playing their hearts out for a spot on the bench at Euro 2016.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world will be embarking on another round of Russia 2018 qualifying. The Europeans with 52 participating countries start in September 2016, while South America with only 10 teams have been at it since last month. Not to be outdone in the madness of prolonged qualifying processes, Oceania completed Round 1 in September and have another round to go to determine which two teams will play in the play-off to decide who will play in the intercontinental play-off in the hope that a team from Oceania makes it to Russia. One would not be amiss for thinking that there must be a lot of teams in the Oceania region, a lot of obscure countries that are not known. No. There are 11 teams. Eleven. And it takes over two years to whittle them down to one country that might make it to Russia. Australia got so bored with all of this they begged to be considered Asian and off they went to join a qualifying region where they would have more than one competitive match. That meant no more world record wins like their 31-0 win against American Samoa in 2002 qualifying. So New Zealand became the new giants of the Pacific Ocean. In the first qualifying phase without Australia, they made it to South Africa in 2010, drew their three matches in the first round and finished above Italy, narrowly missing out on a spot in the second round. That was after an intercontinental play-off win against Bahrain. In 2014, they weren't so lucky and had to play against an angry Mexican team, angry that they were relegated to the humiliation of a play-off to qualify. It wasn't even close. With New Zealand as the new big boys of Oceania and Australia now pretending they're Asian, it would be fairly comical if they ended up playing each other in the intercontinental play-off.

This amusing world cup qualification process distracted me from my original intention, to look for a football parallel of the current tension between Russia and Turkey. Football often has a good story that distracts from other unfortunate realities, even though that story may also be political and reflected in circumstances surrounding the football meeting of the two countries. In this case, it's a good thing that I got carried away with the 11 island nations in the Pacific as there is very little to report on a footballing history between Russia and Turkey. There are records of just two official matches between the mens' national teams, and both of them were friendlies in April 1994 and April 1998.  Russia won 1-0 twice. The old Soviet Union played Turkey 16 times, but never in a World Cup. But this current conflict is between Russia, not the countries of the Soviet Union, and Turkey. Some of those countries would hardly be supporting Russia right now.

So with no fascinating stories of epic, controversial football matches between the two countries we will have to hope that nothing comes of what is going on right now that would set a horrible scene for a possible meeting in the future. A World Cup group of Russia, Ukraine, Syria and Turkey in 2018 could be very, very interesting. Who would be first to boycott?