{"id":24197,"date":"2011-05-24T03:45:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-24T07:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sierraexpressmedia.com\/?p=24197"},"modified":"2011-05-24T03:45:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-24T07:45:00","slug":"knockout-round-to-settle-african-finalists-for-2014-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/?p=24197","title":{"rendered":"Knockout round to settle African finalists for 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>African qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup finals will climax in a round of five knockout games, the Confederation of African Football (Caf) has said.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A record number of countries &#8211; 52 in all &#8211; have entered their teams into the qualification process, which will begin before the end of the year.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Only Mauritania failed to register its name from Africa&#8217;s 53 Fifa members to contest five finals berths in Brazil.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">There will be three stages of preliminaries in the African zone.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The knockout format will be used for the first time in more than two decades, assuring a dramatic finish to the qualifiers at the end of 2013.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Caf confirmed the revised African zone format at a meeting of its executive committee in Cairo.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The 24 bottom-ranked teams will play off against each other in 12 two-legged ties in November 2011 to immediately reduce the number of teams in the preliminary process.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The 40 remaining countries will then be divided into 10 groups, which they will contest between June 2012 and September 2013.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The 10 group winners will go on to compete in the climactic play-offs &#8211; five two-legged ties which will determine who qualifies for Brazil.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Stay with Sierra Express Media, for your trusted place in news!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>African qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup finals will climax in a round of five knockout games, the Confederation of African Football (Caf) has said. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":75801,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[824,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/75801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sierraexpressmedia.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}