Women's World Cup 2023: Last 16 predictions
The 2023 Women's World Cup group stage is already over. If you blinked, you probably missed it! Now it's time to get stuck into the business end of the tournament as the knockouts begin.
This has been the first 32-team version of the Women's World Cup and concerns about a possible increase in the number of heavily one-sided games that have been seen in previous editions have not become a reality. If anything, the opposite is true.
Jamaica, South Africa and Morocco are into the knockouts for the very first time, joining some much more established nations like the United States, England, Sweden, France and Australia. Even many of those, Japan excluded, flattered to deceive at some point during the group stage. Some others didn't make it out at all, however, with Germany, Canada and Brazil surprisingly crashing out early.
Each country that has reached this stage of the competition now has a visible path to the final.
The top two teams from each of the eight groups have progressed to the last 16. Group winners are seeded and will face the runners-up from a corresponding other group — Group A winners vs Group C runners-up, and Group C winners vs Group A runners-up, for example.
The group stage was evenly split between the co-hosts, but only two of the eight, but only two of the last 16 ties will be played in New Zealand. The rest are in Australia, with the larger of the two now taking over the lion's share of hosting duties for the remainder of the tournament.
With their wings clipped through circumstances of the national federation's own doing, Spain breezed through their opening two group games against Costa Rica and Zambia. But things then got a lot tricker when they played another high-ranking team in Japan, convincingly
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