The playoffs make reasonable sense until you get to the bit where they rank the winning playoff teams, which is absolutely nuts. So you come second in your group, win your two playoff matches but still don't qualify because you drew with Slovakia or someone a year earlier - that's crazy.
The only thing is that, with the huge differences in standards that exist in women's football, there must be a reasonable chance that the inter continental playoff you'd then go into would be against some absolute no hoper from another continent, so you might qualify easily anyway.
Overall from an Irish point of view though, qualification looks extremely difficult here. Even if they get second in the group they still need to win two playoff games, most likely against higher ranked teams, and maybe an inter continental playoff as well. Big ask for them to qualify.
But yet we'll no doubt see countries from other parts of the world have much easier qualification paths and then get 13-0 type beatings in the finals, as happened in 2019.
EDIT: Just looked at the inter continental playoff format as well and that's a complete mess too - groups of three, groups of four etc.
There's got to be a better way...
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