Qatar might still surprise people. They are eagerly looking forward to this final tournament and also have all the support. And all African countries are of course also used to having to play football in these circumstances. Something European footballers are not used to. And it's also the middle of Europe's winter. If you play in England, for example, you have a chance that you were still in the snow 2 weeks before. Those are all factors that come into play. We can expect the Netherlands to have the weakest green, but it would be nice if Qatar goes to the next round.
What do you mean by surprise people? Get surprisingly good results and advance to next round? I don't think that's possible at all. They will just finish the group in last place and if they get a draw they are lucky. My expectation for them is to get exact zero points.
Some African teams are really good and if we see some of them in next stages I wouldn't be surprised. We saw Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal in previous tournaments do good things. I wouldn't expect any other club than European and South American to be in semi finals though. That's the stage things are going hotter and big teams don't do easy mistakes at that point.
So, host countries that have the opportunity to participate in a world cup without participating in a qualifying stage hardly have good results.
And in this year... excluding Holland (who will probably qualify first), I believe it's very difficult to see Qatar doing better than Ecuador or Senegal.
So I also believe that Qatar shouldn't get past the group stage.