Give me five minutes more, only five minutes more ....

It is the song of the Derby County football team. The team went into the premier league a few season back but they couldn't hack it and fell back into football league championships where they languish just below half way down

It seem England are being given good odds (5/1) in some quarters to win the world cup - at this stage a tad behind Spain (4/1).

I don't like odds and prefer to convert them to pobablities; England 1/6 (.1667), Spain 1/5 or .20 and Brazil 11/2 which is a probablity of 2/13 or .1548.

I have done a small analysis of the probabilities of winning by group.

It is pretty clear to see that group A will be very hard fought with so many teams with similarly low probabilites,


By contrast, group H should se an easy win for Spain. New Zealand in group F with a 0.001 probability of winning will have their work cut out against Italy with a 0.0909 probability of winning.