With Maradona unable to transfer his greatness as a player to the bench, Argentina looked in danger of failing to qualify and barely made it. Maradona, should he keep the coach’s job going into the finals, now has to get the best out of undoubted talents such as Lionel Messi, Carlos Tevez and Sergio Aguero to make an impact in South Africa.

With its squad still filled with aging stars, Italy will struggle to hold on to the title and become the first back-to-back winner since Brazil in 1962. The flip side of that is that Fabio Cannavaro, Gianluca Zambrotta, Gianluigi Buffon and Andrea Pirlo all know how to win to World Cup—and that means the Italians can’t be discounted.

Declining under coach Raymond Domenech, France needed a blatant handball by Thierry Henry against Ireland to make it through the playoffs, while Portugal coach Carlos Queiroz seems unable to get the best out of stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Deco and Ricardo Carvalho.

The United States has revived under coach Bob Bradley and, after reaching the final of the Confederations Cup in South Africa in June, will target the quarterfinals as a measure of its improvement. The Americans reached that stage in 2002, have reliable goalkeepers, dependable defenders and talented forwards in Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey.

Slideshow How they got to South Africa Take a visual tour of how countries like Cristiano Ronaldo's Portugal squad qualified for the 2010 World Cup

Australia hopes to justify moving to the Asian Confederation and underline its status as an emerging force in world soccer while Japan needs to make the second round to show it is a breeding ground for talented players. The same applies to African nations Cameroon, Nigeria and Ghana, which will also measure success as reaching the knockout phase.

South Korea is back to try and emulate its semifinal appearance of 2002, when it was a co-host with Japan, and the North Koreans, among the 500-1 outsiders, might be dreaming of embarrassing the Italians the same way as in England in 1966.

Greece has made it for only the second time but, still with veteran coach Otto Rehhagel in charge, hopes to produce the same surprising success as when it won the 2004 European championship.

Mexico, Chile and Uruguay aren’t likely to get past the first round, while for New Zealand, Honduras, Slovenia, Slovakia and Algeria, simply being at the World Cup is a measure of success and anything they can achieve at the finals will be a bonus.

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