Ireland's Euro 2016 qualifying hopes are in their own hands with two games remaining.
However, being the pessimistic bunch that we are, we find it difficult to see us picking up six points from our two remaining and very difficult games against Germany and Poland.
Thanks to a serious dig out by Georgia last month we're in with a chance of making the third placed playoff, which we'd have probably accepted before a ball was even kicked.
Playoffs tend to be a lottery and we certainly struck gold when we landed Estonia in 2011 thanks to being seeded for the draw.
So how could we manage find ourselves seeded, and with a favourable draw, should we find ourselves finishing third.
Current Standings
This is how things stand currently for the third placed teams, unfortunately our hard earned 6 points against Gibraltar are in vain as Group I has only five teams, meaning results against the weakest team in everyone else's group is void.
Finishing top and advancing directly is extremely unlikely so for the purpose of this exercise we'll rule out that possibility. In this case the top four seeded teams will be drawn against the bottom four.
Seeding
Seeding is determined by UEFA's coefficient ranking which calculates performances in Euro 2012, World Cup 2014, and Euro 2016.
Believe it or not this could be good news for us as our UEFA coefficient is a lot stronger than our measly FIFA ranking of 54.
Coefficient
Here's the most recent coefficient rankings, calculated after the last round of internationals. It makes good reading for Irish fans as it would mean Ukraine, who currently sit top of the third placed teams, would go through automatically. This would leave us seeded by virtue of having the third highest coefficient.
If any team ranked below us in the above table goes through as the best placed third team, we are then in severe danger of being unseeded for the playoff draw, which could mean a tricky tie against Croatia, Sweden or Ukraine.
If we are seeded, the one tricky tie we'd hope to avoid would be against Turkey who dismissed Netherlands 3-0 last month.
