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“We were originally notified that it was a CONCACAF-rankings table and we were tracking everything and building all our planning on the CONCACAF rankings, and that’s what had originally been presented when the Nations League was formally presented to the member associations,” Herdman said in a conference call with a select group of media outlets Wednesday announcing the squad selection for the game against Cuba. “That changed in July 2019. So we woke up one morning and the rankings table isn’t there anymore, it’s gone. We changed gears, that’s in the past and the future is the future now. We’re focused now on what we can control and what we have to do now to put ourselves in the best position to qualify for the HEX (top-six).”

The new CONCACAF World Cup qualifying system takes the top six teams in the region according to FIFA rankings and pits them in a group to battle it out for three qualifying spots for Qatar. The rest of the teams in the federation are placed into a secondary tournament to battle for a partial qualifying spot awarded to the region.

Currently ranked eighth among CONCACAF countries in the FIFA rankings behind Mexico (12), the United States (22), Costa Rica (44), Jamaica (52), Honduras (67), El Salvador (68) and Panama (74), Canada (78) is destined to play in the lower-seeded group.

If Canada manages to get through the lower-seeded group, they would play a home-and-home series with the fourth-place team from the original group of six. If they get through that, then they would play a home-and-home series with a team from another confederation to get to Qatar.