Playing for a result

Has anyone ever had the situation where it would be better if they lost/drew/scraped a win rather than win heavily? Here's my scenario - I'm England manager at the 2014 WC. In my group are Portugal, Uruguay and Iran. The winner of my group will play France (ranked no. 1 in the world who were runners up in their group) and the second placed team will play Greece(...). On the French side of the draw you would probably have to play Spain/Argentina/Italy in the QF, on the Greek side of the draw it would most probably be Mexico. Here's my group as it stands (we're last to play in the group stage):

W D L GF GA GD Pts

England 1 1 0 3 1 2 4

Portugal 1 1 0 3 1 2 4

Iran 1 0 1 1 2 -1 3

Uruguay 0 0 2 0 3 -3 0

Now I play Iran in the final game, Portugal play Uruguay. Now clearly a draw will see me go through. I expect Portugal to beat Uruguay, but the problem is if I beat Iran by more goals than Portugal beat Uruguay (as seems likely) I end up on the tough side of the draw. However if I get a worse result than Portugal I finish as runner up but get the easy side of the draw. So my thoughts are to go 1-0 against Iran then go all out defensive and hope Portugal put at least a couple past Uruguay. How easy is this to achieve do you think?

That's a dream scenario IMO. You can't afford to lose, so put out a strong team, keep eye on the Portugal result, and if you need to drop in a few goals, put all your defenders up front, they'll surely geta few goals

What if the Portugal manager's thinking the same thing? You could end up in a weird situation with you telling your team to score an oggy, then he finds out and gets his team to do the same.

In fact that did kind of happen a few years back where a team had to concede to progress through a tournament.

To be the best you have to beat the best

You will have to play France eventually anyway.

It didn't go well. I put out a near full strength side and went a goal up inside 15 mins. At that point I put the shutters down and went 4-5-1 ultra defensive, kept everyone back for set pieces. We went 2-0 up still and so did Portugal, but we were still top of the group (on alphabetical order?!) but then we got a third from a free kick. With 10 mins remaining I took everyone out of defence leaving the goal wide open but Iran only managed to score 1 and we won the group on goals scored

Oh well if I have to play France it may as well be now when they're on a bad run, let's hope Brazil, Germany, Italy etc. all have the same thing...

Poor, you only waited until you were 3 whole goals up before you fulfilled the necessary tactics to get you the draw

Poor, you only waited until you were 3 whole goals up before you fulfilled the necessary tactics to get you the draw

Well I didn't want to risk drawing, a last minute goal and I'm a gonner. It was impossible to prevent the other two goals, I did all I could. I gave Iran 1 goal which felt pretty bad, they couldn't score against a wide open defence for 15 mins. I even sent the keeper up for set pieces. What more could I do??!!

put your striker in goal??

Much more rewarding personally if you win the WC by beating the best teams along the way though I would say.

Much more rewarding personally if you win the WC by beating the best teams along the way though I would say.

I don't think we'll win the WC anyway, but the FA expect me to make the QF and playing against the best team in the world in the second round is a severe disadvantage to me keeping my job. Ah well as it's England we may as well do it the hard way and teach those frogs a lesson while we're at it!