{"id":176693,"date":"2025-12-05T14:40:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T14:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/176693\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T14:40:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T14:40:07","slug":"republic-of-ireland-and-northern-ireland-to-learn-potential-opponents-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/176693\/","title":{"rendered":"Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland to learn potential opponents \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">Hello and welcome to live coverage of the 2026 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/world-cup\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/world-cup\/\">World Cup<\/a> draw, which takes place at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC at 5pm. Or at least starting at 5pm, with Tom Brady, Wayne Gretzky and Shaquille O\u2019Neal among others involved it might go on a while.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">It\u2019s somewhat a hypothetical for the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, it requires winning two playoff games, but they will at least know then who they will be playing and whether qualifying will give them a chance of going far in the tournament or not. They will be in pot 4, where there is a a smattering of quality in all pots, but pot 1 has the big hitters and the not-quite-so-strong hosts of USA, Mexico, Canada, so they\u2019d be better ones to get.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">Pot 1 will include the host nations \u2013 USA, Canada and Mexico alongside Spain, Argentina, France, England, Brazil, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">Pot 2, based on Fifa rankings, will be Croatia, Morocco, Colombia, Uruguay, Switzerland, Japan, Senegal, Iran, South Korea, Ecuador, Austria and Australia.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">Pot 3 includes Norway, Panama, Egypt, Algeria, Scotland, Paraguay, Tunisia, C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire, Uzbekistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">Pot 4 includes Jordan, Cape Verde, Ghana, Cura\u00e7ao, Haiti, New Zealand and the six outstanding qualifiers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hello and welcome to live coverage of the 2026 World Cup draw, which takes place at the Kennedy&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43,1842,4018],"class_list":["post-176693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-republic-of-ireland-mnt","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}