In Fair Play Lose

Michy Batshuayi Wins the Golden Gif Award

THE LAST three days of the World Cup ran from the gamut, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. These games always take on a different sort of flavor, in that everything that every team is doing is predicated upon getting a specific result. In the case of something like France and Denmark, what this meant is that nobody gave a damn. Sure, the Danes could have decided to go for it and try to win the game and win the group, but the risk of opening themselves up and possibly losing, when they hadn’t clinched a spot in the 16s, was far greater than the benefit of winning. And since the French didn’t need any sort of a result, what you wind up getting is a game that will make you want those 90 minutes of your life back.

But when teams did, in fact, need to do something, you at least get to see some unusual tactical approaches. You see stuff like Iceland bombing forward and trying to boss Croatia – which they’re not well-versed in doing but needed to do, given they needed to win, preferably by more than one goal, in order to ensure safety. They failed at this, but not for lack of effort. Jesus, how many good chances did Iceland miss? Whereas in the past, we would be lauding Iceland for achieving the goal of even reaching the World Cup, I suspect they will go home feeling as if they have underachieved. They should have done more.

Match Day 3 is also fun because what you often find out is that teams with “nothing to play for” do, in fact, have something to play for. Very few teams actually give up if they’re eliminated while still having a game to play. Guys play for pride, they play to give their fans and themselves good memories. So you had teams like Costa Rica and Peru getting deserved results, you had Tunisia and Panama giving it a go and playing some entertaining football and having themselves some fun. And how can you not have some fun? You’re playing in the World Cup, for godsakes. So simply assuming a team that’s out of it is just going to roll over and play dead for you is foolhardy. The vanquished can still rise up and bite you.

Well, that was different

But the best thing of all about Match Day 3 occurs when it’s all to play for in a group, with the two games going on at the same time, and the goings on in one game are directly affecting the other. Insanity sets in as teams chase results and it all gets wildly entertaining. We got a taste of that on Monday, when Iran was inches away from eliminating Portugal after seeming to be dead to rites just a few minutes earlier. Tuesday and Wednesday were even more dramatic still, and then Thursday was … well, weird. If it involves Group H, it has to be weird, but it got weirder than I ever could have imagined.

That pretty much sums up this game

• When the draw was first announced, everyone pointed out that Group A was trash, but when I looked at Group H, I thought it to be just as bad, because at least Group A had a team in Uruguay who looked like they could actually do something in the tourney, whereas Group H consisted of an overrated Poland, a Colombia team which made a name for itself four years ago but hasn’t been all that good in the past couple of years, a Japan team where everyone was acting like they hated each other, and a Senegal team that was something of an unknown. Nothing about that group excited me, The group’s been weird from the get-go, and ended in something of a farcical fashion.
Colombia needed a 1:0 over Senegal to qualify for the Round of 16, while at the same time, Poland was going about defeating Japan by the same 1:0 score. This left both Senegal and Japan tied for second place on 4 points. Each team won one, lost one, and drew one, each team scored 4 goals, each team allowed 4 goals, and the result of the game between the two sides was a 2:2 draw. They were as even-steven as could be.
So … now what?
Some historical precedent here. This same situation happened in 1990, which, going into Match Day 3, was on the verge of being the biggest clusterfuck in World Cup history, as all four teams – England, Holland, Ireland, Egypt – were on 2 points with a goal difference of zero and with each team having scored one and conceded one. The Dutch and the Irish traded goals in the first half of their final match, while England was on their way to winning 1:0 over Egypt, and at some point in the second half, the two captains – Ruud Gullit and Mick McCarthy – decided to commence an impromptu meeting on the pitch, and they concurred that it made no point for either of the two teams to try and winning, since if the results held up, both of them would advance to the Round of 16. (In the 24-team tournament, the four best 3rd-place teams advanced, and a draw would clinch spots for both teams.) It was at which point the two sides basically stopped playing, which was pretty goddamn annoying, to be honest. (This led to a moment where the annoyed official asked McCarthy if his side was going to bother to play any football, and McCarthy, ever the quipster, said it was actually the best football they’d played all tournament.) So, with both teams tied on 3 points, 0 goal difference, and 2 goals scored, they had to draw lots … and the Dutch lost the draw, of course, because they always lose in the most amazing and unique of ways, and the Dutch then had to play the West Germans in the Round of 16 and lost, while the Irish played Romania and won. Everyone agrees this is a lousy way to break deadlocks.
Here in 2018, FIFA has added another level of tiebreaker before the drawing of lots becomes necessary: fair play records. This seems to me to be a stupid way to do it, given that such decisions are, by their nature, the result of a subjective decision by the referees. It feels like a completely random and arbitrary criteria. That said, FIFA is intent upon cleaning up the game, and the bulk of yellow- and red-card offenses – bad fouls, dissent, acts of petulance, and generally acting like a douchebag on the pitch – are the sorts of things we generally want to see less and less of. Using a fair play record as a tiebreaker has been incorporated into a number of different tournaments, but it has never come up. It was not something anyone really thought much about.
Until now, that is. With no way to differentiate between the two sides, the tiebreaker turned to fair play records, and Senegal’s side had amassed two more yellow cards than Japan, so out of the tourney Senegal go while the Blue Samurai advance to the next round.
And this is a dumb way to do this. It’s a really dumb way to do this. But, as dumb as it is, its still better than drawing lots. At least this tiebreaker in based upon something which occurs on the pitch, rather than some guy sticking his hand in a hat. You have to break the deadlock somehow. There isn’t time in the tourney to have a replay or a playoff game. It’s a dumb solution, but I’m hard pressed to think of a better one.
About the best I could come up with for two teams who tied for second is head-to-head result against the team that finished first (which, in this case, would have favored Japan as well), but I can’t really defend that idea. Much as they decide games on penalties, using fair play records is an imperfect outcome which nobody likes, but no one can come up with a better idea.
And how this played out on the pitch was absurd. The Japanese were down a goal and, once they found out that Colombia had scored and that they’d advance if the results held, the Blue Samurai just basically stopped playing – and, of course, since Poland was winning and the opposition weren’t trying to play, they didn’t see a reason to keep playing, either, meaning the last 15 minutes of this match were completely pointless. It’s farcical, of course, but contrary to dumb screeds like this one, there’s nothing particularly shameful about the Japanese doing this. They’re certainly not the first team to stop trying to attack when there is no reason to do so. Quite honestly, they’d be idiotic to do so.
The whole situation is strange, and it sucks for Senegal, who can rightly feel like the outcome is a bit harsh. But, at the same time, they knew the rules going into the tournament. They’d still be playing if their keeper hadn’t flapped aimlessly and given up a sloppy second to Japan which allowed them to salvage a draw, or had they not sloppily defended a Polish set piece in the final few minutes, or maybe, you know, if they had scored another damn goal! The lesson here is that, in a small sample size such as this, all the plays matter, and nothing can be taken for granted.

• It seemed appropriate that the most absurd game of the tournament would wind up involving the Belgians. The situation where it appears to be beneficial finishing second instead of first in Group G played out, and the two sides swapped out 18 starters and played one of the dullest, least-inspired, least-interesting matches since … well, since France and Denmark played to a 0:0 draw on Wednesday. It seemed oddly appropriate that this game was decided by Adnan Januzaj, who could have played for England but chose to play for Belgium, and whose actually very nice goal at 51’ gave Belgium a 1:0 victory, which has all sorts of English pundits and penmen and fans giddy about the fact that England actually lost:

Irrational English overconfidence, then and now

The English are happy because they’ve now avoided the half of the 16s bracket which features Brazil, who hammered Serbia 2:0 on Wednesday, and also the possibility of playing France or Argentina. To which I say, be careful what you wish for. Losing to Belgium means playing Colombia next, who are a helluva lot better than Japan. Granted, there is likely to be no James, who aggravated a calf injury today against Senegal, but teams would best not be worrying about whom they might meet and focus upon who they will meet. If they manage to fuck up and lose to Colombia, this team is going to get absolutely killed – and they will deserve it, given the collective arrogance rearing its ugly head surrounding this upcoming game with the Colombians. Do not overthink this. Do not make grandiose plans about the quarters and the semis. Beat the team in front of you, and then figure it out from there.
To that end, even though Belgium wouldn’t have cared if they lost, I’m not so sure they care that they won, either. If it comes to pass, the Belgians will go into a quarterfinal with Brazil thinking they can win – and given some of the shaky defending Seleção put forth while nursing a 1-goal lead over the Serbs, England probably should have been thinking that way, as well.
This game, along with the aforementioned France-Denmark game, are both ultimately something of a fluke owing to the way that the tournament was drawn up. When they make the original draw, they also map out the entire schedule for the tournament, so when England came out of the pot at G4, it meant that they were going to play Belgium in the very last game of the tournament, and when Panama and Tunisia came out of the hat as G2 and G3 – two considerably weaker sides – it also meant there was very little chance this game would mean much, since both teams were likely to have six points. This isn’t really something which should lead to any irrational changes in the schedule going forward. That the game fell where it did in the schedule was, ultimately, random chance.
That doesn’t mean the game didn’t suck, however. It did. It was trash. I was reminded, watching England mess up, of the infamous London Olympics badminton tournament where teams were discovered to be losing on purpose to set up better match-ups, with the only defense from the various federations being along the lines of “our athletes really are that bad,” which begs the question of what they were doing in the Olympics in the first place. England’s reserves performed in a generally incompetent fashion that would make me not feel too confident in my squad’s depth going forward. Having said that, their first XI has been dynamite, and while this game on Thursday between Belgium and England was trash, it is not outlandish, by any means, to think that the final on the 15th of July might wind up being a repechage involving these two teams ...

Where did everybody go?

• There was something life-affirming and soothing about watching the scenes from places like Los Angeles and Mexico City on Wednesday when, unbeknownst to everyone, it suddenly became “Hug a Korean” day. The sort of outpouring of joy where El Tri fans are parading with South Korean fans on their shoulders, or drinking tequila with the South Korean ambassador outside the embassy, or sending over cases of beer to their new Korean friends, is something that we could use more of in this lifetime. It’s why we watch sports, when you get right down to it. It’s beautiful and we need more of it.
And it was all so spontaneous and sudden. El Tri were getting hammered by the Swedes in Ekaterinburg, absolutely hammered, down 3:0 after giving up a series of horrible goals in the 2nd half – first a Swedish defender runs 50 yards unmarked and smashes one, then a penalty, then an own goal that would have been a penalty, as it bounced off a defender’s arm and in. It was a farce and it was hopeless, because at any point Germany would score against the South Koreans and Mexico would be going home. And the Mexican fans in the stadium in Ekaterinburg then suddenly start cheering in stoppage time, all of them on their phones following the other game. A huge cheer – South Korea had scored – and then a hush – the goal was under review … but it’s a good goal, and VAR clearly shows the play is onside, and then another eruption from the El Tri faithful, which confuses the hell out of the Mexican players on the pitch, all of whom have gotten their asses whooped.
Mexico have made a habit now of slipping through the back door when it comes to the World Cup, because the unthinkable happened in the other group game: the Germans didn’t win. The Germans are out. They are out after the first round for the first time since 1938 after being stunned 2:0 by the South Koreans on a pair of stoppage time goals. For anyone who seriously follows this game, the Germans coming up short is a shock to the system.
But also a delight because, let’s be honest here, people hate the Germans, and for obvious reasons: the Germans are always so damn good. But from the get-go, something wasn’t right about this team. They were so open against the Mexicans in the opener, so exposed and so vulnerable. It just didn’t make sense. But Mexico laid out the blueprint in that first game: if you stand them up, run at them and commit to playing on the break, the Germans are slow and unathletic, they are disorganized and they struggle to keep up.
The money line in Las Vegas on the Koreans for this game was +1300. This was a huge shocker and yet, in hindsight, it maybe shouldn’t have been. South Korea’s calling card in this game has always been a commitment to high tempo and, in Son Heung-min, they also happened to have the best player on the pitch.
Which is stunning to say about the Germans, but the fact is that other than Toni Kroos, this team just doesn’t have élite players any more. They were élite players once, but the core of this group were first playing together in South Africa in 2010. Eight years is a long time to keep a core together. It shouldn’t be a surprise that four of the past five World Cup champions have then failed to get out of the group stages in the next event four years later. There’s a tendency to value loyalty and experience above all, thinking that it can overcome youth and athleticism. It can, but only to a point. Most teams that win World Cups consist of players in their prime, but four years pass and a great number of them are no longer in their prime. The Germans who combined technique and moxie with athleticism in 2010 and 2014 were so slow, so disjointed, and so immobile this time around. All of those great German traits of commitment and resolve and teamwork simply didn’t matter any more. The Koreans ran all over the Germans. Quite honestly, the final scoreline could have been worse.
And once the losing starts, of course, you hear about the in-fighting and the bickering in the back rooms. This always happens when you’re losing. These were not happy campers. It was pretty obvious by the wholesale changes for each game that Joachim Löw had no idea who his best XI were. He was inclined to trust the old guard, the vets who’d won him titles in the past, even though it was pretty obvious that all of them had lost a step. Muller was horrible, Özil was horrible, Khedira could barely move and the central defense resembled a turnstile. Manuel Neuer got his job back in goal, even though he’s barely played in nine months, and there he was wandering aimlessly 70 yards from his goal and getting dispossessed for the Koreans’ second goal, an incredibly dumb play made by a guy who can no longer get away with making those sorts of plays.
The Germans lost to South Korea and the better team won. I can’t believe I just said that, but the better team won. South Korea did not ride their luck. They deserved to win this game. It feels weird to say that, it feels off somehow. Certainly, no one is going to shed any tears for them, nor should they. What was originally a strangely likable German team back in 2010, a young and fun bunch who oozed potential and reached it four years later, was clearly just a shell of itself and Löw had no more buttons to push. After the first Swedish goal against Mexico, I flipped over to this game, and I kept thinking to myself that the Germans would score at any moment, because that’s what they do, just as they’d done to Sweden over the weekend. But the goals didn’t come. The ideas weren’t there. They were resorting to taking optimistic shots which had no chance. They were not finishing the good chances that the likes of Klose and Muller had been handed, on a platter, for years. It was such a sad performance, in the end, one that was unbecoming of a champion. I’d have thought that the Germans would go out because Spain or France or, yes, England would have to rise up to the challenge and play a great game. I never could’ve imagined a German team that seemed, in the end, so meek, so old and so frail.

• The other meek, old and frail “dynasts” – and I use that term out of respect for their 100-year legacy, rather than what they’ve actually accomplished recently – managed to survive where the Germans failed simply because they have someone who can do this:

This is some goddamn artistry and needs to be properly appreciated.pic.twitter.com/xVVtnlfDiD

— Roderick MacNeil (@rodmacneil) June 27, 2018

The biggest difference between Argentina and Germany, at this point, is the fact that Argentina have Messi and Germany doesn’t. That goal was spectacular. The way he controls the ball like that, on the dead run, is truly special and should be cherished. As bad have Argentina have been, they can still turn to a guy who can do something like this to jump start them in a time of need.
Messi may have gotten the ball rolling, but Argentina wound up having to leave it late. Argentina are still a mess, and they played like a mess after the Nigerian equalizer – and it was a penalty, so I don’t want to hear all of my Argentine fan friends whining. It was a penalty. Stop it already. Don’t give me this bullshit about how it wasn’t a penalty in the other games so it shouldn’t be one now. It should have been one all along. It was a stupid play by Mascherano, who had a rotten game for Argentina – understandable, I suppose, given all of the rumors swirling about that he was actually now a de facto player/coach, with Sampaoli reduced to being a figurehead no one was paying attention to. I will use the fact Mascherano was trying to coach on the pitch as an excuse for why he was abject.
Once the game drew level, Argentina reverted to being chickens with their heads cut off, running around aimlessly in defense and showing no coherence whatsoever. The Nigerians had already thrown Argentina a lifeline by beating Iceland, and here the Nigerians were doing it again with a series of poor finishes when they had chances to bury Argentina.
Argentina ultimately won this game because they stopped making sense. They threw so many men forward that Nigeria couldn’t get out of its own end. The winning goal was from a center back in the 85th minute – what was he doing in the center of the box? Who cares? It worked! Argentina’s formation looked like a 2-2-6 at that point, with everyone forward even after they’d scored the go-ahead goal. It was an act of impromptu strategy necessitated by the circumstance. It made no sense at all. In that sense, it was brilliant.
So Argentina lives to see another day, they can show up for work happy and everyone can pretend they like each other for a few more days. Given how they like to play, and given how France likes to play, I have no idea how they’re going to stop the forwards for Les Blues from just running absolutely rampant on them, but once you get to the knockouts, the World Cup is all about making stuff up on the fly. Whatever works, you do it. If you have the best player on the pitch, you have a chance to win – and with Messi, Argentina always have the best player on the pitch. I’d be stunned if Argentina progressed any further in this tournament, but paradoxically, I also wouldn’t be surprised at all.

On to the Round of 16! This tournament has been sensational so far. Let’s hope we don’t devolve into these boring tactical battles which wind up being settled on penalties and making everyone unhappy. We all deserve better outcomes than that. Let’s all hope that we get them.

VAR-iance

Photo of the tournament

DESPERATION soccer is the best. There comes a point where you have to try to get a result and all tactics and defensive rigidity and whatnot go flying out the window, the game gets stretched and it becomes this madcap, end-to-end scramble. When that happens in a soccer game, it becomes the best sporting spectacle there is. And when, in the World Cup, it’s going on in two games simultaneously, it makes for the most wildly entertaining of viewing.

Monday was looney tunes. I had two windows open on Telemundo simultaneously, watching both the Morocco-Spain and Portugal-Iran games at the same time. And both the games were absolutely nuts: goal scoring chances galore, tackles flying in, wild controversies that VAR couldn’t sort out – or, should I say, that referees on the field were unwilling to sort out, but we’ll get to that in a minute – controversies and mood swings and wild twists and turns. It was an absolute roller coaster. It was thrilling entertainment, even though both games wound up in draws.

It was madness, and it was thrilling – and all of it was awash in controversy. Spain gets an equalizer in a 2:2 draw with Morocco thanks to VAR – a goal incorrectly ruled out for offsides that was correctly overturned – but then VAR gives a nitwitted penalty to the Iranians in stoppage time which allows them to level at 1:1 with Portugal and, all of a sudden, Iran has a lifeline and bomb forward in the final 3 minutes and nearly get the winner which would have won them the group and kicked Portugal out. Portugal had a right to bitch about that call – but Portugal didn’t have a right to bitch about the fact that Ronaldo probably should have been sent off at 81’ for his elbow on an Iranian defender. By the letter of the law, it should have been a red. It was mitigated because the Iranian flopped like a fish, but there was this amazing two-minute period where the referee was checking the replay and I was thinking to myself, “holy shit, Ronaldo’s going to get sent off,” and Ronaldo has this frightened look on his face as he was waiting for his fate …

But Ronaldo only got a yellow card, and over in the other game going on simultaneously, Gerard Pique somehow was allowed to remain on the pitch despite a two-footed challenge straight out of prison rules football. The problem with replay in situations such as this is that human beings need to make the calls, and human beings are still reticent to do things like throw a superstar like Ronaldo or Pique out of a game. NBA fans bitch all the time about how superstars get the calls – while, of course, also lamenting that they don’t have a star of their own on their team to get those calls for themselves – but superstars getting the calls is sort of human nature. The former baseball umpire Ron Luciano spoke to this human nature in his autobiography: if a Hall of Fame batter like Rod Carew gets to a 3-2 count, fouls off eight straight pitches and then takes a close pitch on the edge of the zone, you’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt because he’s earned it over the course of his career. Referees want the best players to decide the game and don’t want to overly influence the games themselves – a noble idea with the problem being, of course, that not making calls influences the games too much as well.

The problem with VAR is that we all keep winding up talking about it, whether or not it worked the way it was supposed to. VAR overturning a call and getting it right reminds you of just how much stuff actually gets called wrong during the course of a game, the sort of bullshit like disallowed goals for offsides which nearly happened to Spain in the dying moments. VAR still getting a call wrong makes you wonder what the point is. There were four penalties awarded on Monday, and all of them were varying degrees of weak. Attempting to wade into the grey areas of the game just make the waters even murkier than before. Maybe Morocco’s Nordin Amrabat was right when he said that VAR is bullshit, but now that we’ve introduced this technology, we can’t exactly go back and stuff the djinni in a bottle:

The swings in these games were crazy. As I’m watching this Paraguayan referee thinking about what to do with Ronaldo, Morocco’s up 2-1 and running all over Spain, who can’t stop anybody at the moment, and the very real possibility arises that Morocco can get a third and Iran could play 15 or so minutes against a 10-man Portugal, and if Iran can find two goals and Morocco gets a third then Spain would be out! And then Spain scores to blow that up, but Iran is gifted a penalty and Portugal is nervy and Iran miss a god honest chance to win the game and win the group, but it goes for naught. It was all over the place. It was crazy and brilliant and I loved every minute of it. This is the kind of drama that we want to partake in. It might yet get crazier further still in the coming days.

Some random thoughts here from the weekend, which I didn’t get to write about. Last week, I went into lamenting how the defenses were being resolute and the offenses lacked an edge, and then there were 34 goals in nine games, which undoubtedly ruined more than a few journos’ articles, in the process:

*Prays the two Group F games are 0-0 so his piece about dearth of World Cup goals in tomorrow's Observer doesn't look really silly.*

— Jonathan Wilson (@jonawils) June 23, 2018

It was, in fact, a triumph of the proactive over the pragmatic. At some point, you need to go forward and take some risks and try to win the bloody game. Two teams came from a goal down to win 2:1 in stoppage time. Nigeria did nothing against Iceland in the first half, failing to get a shot off, and then produced 16 in the second half and deservedly notched a 2:0 win. We’ve still not had a 0:0 draw and all of the sudden, the goals are coming from everywhere.

Super Eagles

• As a fan, what I want, above all else, is meaningful games. Dead rubbers are a drag. No one cared about the Egypt-Saudi Arabia game today – which is only worth mentioning because Egypt started a 45-year-old goalkeeper, who actually stopped a penalty and struck a blow for old guys everywhere. But otherwise, no one cares. We want to care. We want all the games to matter, and what took place during the weekend ensured there would be only two dead rubbers among the 16 games of Match Day 3. It’s good for the fans and it’s how we want it.
And I say that as someone who was hoping Iceland would beat Nigeria and as much as eliminate the Argentines, because they have been complete garbage, and who was hoping the Swedes wouldn’t screw up against the Germans, since the Germans were as good as dead with any result other than a win. But now we’ve got great games in store involving those two teams, and many others, over the next three days and it’s all to play for. And in the bigger picture, that’s better.
There are all sorts of outlandish scenarios still in play along the same lines of what we saw in Group B today. South Korea is still alive – wait, what, really? They can’t beat Germany, can they? … then again, have you seen the Germans defend anyone lately? (If so, let us know, because I certainly haven’t.) Australia is still alive, it’s a mess in Group H, the various tiebreakers in Groups D and F could send your head spinning. This is great! I love this! Welcome to the chaos. I want this to get as weird as possible. I want to see frenetic, end-to-end action in the 97th minute as some team is chasing some necessary 3-goal win. Let it all be a glorious mess.

• Having just said all of that, oh Sweden, Sweden, Sweden, jesus, what were you doing? Given that a draw would have put them in a situation where advancement at Germany’s expense would involve nothing more than a leisurely 0:0 draw of a stroll through the park with the Mexicans on Match Day 3, and given that you’re 1:1 with the Germans and they’re reduced to 10 men, you hold all the cards here. Even if you play to win and can’t score, you pin the Germans deep. You can even just play it out and run out the clock. The Germans are chasing the game and they’re down a man, for godsakes. You can’t mess this up.
Sweden messed it up:

That’s the passing chart after the Germans were reduced to 10 men. The Swedes couldn’t make up their minds what to do, and so they basically did nothing. At one point, they messed up a 5-on-2 break, and later on, in the dying seconds, instead of just killing the game, they took a wimpy shot on goal which led to the German break, which led to the Swedish foul, which led to the Toni Kroos free kick:

Now Sweden’s got it all to do against the Mexicans, and El Tri has to take it seriously as well, because both teams now need a result and both teams know the Germans will almost certainly beat the Koreans even though they’re missing both starting center backs – but, given how bad both have been, and how much the Germans improved once Boateng got sent off, this might not be a bad thing after all. You just can’t be giving stuff away. The Swedes gave a game away. Iceland gave a game away and so did the Serbs. Some eccentric goalkeeping in their 2:2 draw might cost either Japan or Senegal a spot in the Round of 16. Mexico giving up a 95th minute goal to South Korea might come back to haunt them – although, granted, the strike by Son was pretty sweet:

 
Oh, and one other thing about Germany v. Sweden. The player who committed the foul, Jimmy Durmaz, is of Syrian descent and was subjected to some rather nasty abuse online along the lines of that he isn’t truly a Swede. This sort of ignorant bullshit really pisses me off, and this sort of abuse led to the Swedish team feeling compelled to make this statement the next day:

Toulouse attacker Jimmy Durmaz was subjected to racist abuse on social media last night after his foul led to Toni Kroos' winning free-kick goal over Sweden. Today, he responded, backed by the whole squad: "F*** racism." pic.twitter.com/vAjhUQ4vg2

— Get French Football News (@GFFN) June 24, 2018

Amen. Fuck racism. And fuck all of the twats who gave Durmaz a hard time. Go find something else to do. Soccer doesn’t need you.

• And since we’re sort of moving along in a political direction here, it’s probably not wise of FIFA to step into the quagmire of Balkan politics – seeing as how that has always worked out so well for every other international agency that’s attempted to do so – but they probably felt like they needed to after Switzerland’s Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri decided to give the Serbian fans the bird. Not the one-fingered American variety, mind you, but the symbol of the double eagle that adorns the Albanian flag:

For those of you who don’t know the back story, both Xhaka and Shaqiri are immigrants to Switzerland from Kosovo, both of them ethnic Albanians. (Xhaka’s backstory is here and, obviously, it’s personal.) From reports I’ve heard and read about the game, the Serb fans were giving it to the Kosovans wearing Swiss colors rather extensively during the game, and both of them felt obliged to troll after they each scored in Switzerland’s 2:1 comeback win over the Serbs. Now FIFA is opening an inquest into whether or not this is an inflammatory political gesture, and the Serbs are understandably mad about it, and welcome to the quagmire. When I saw these two teams drawn together, I knew this could turn into a mess, since it seems as if every game that involves a lot of players or teams from that particular region of the world turns into a mess. And you can see why. It was an ugly, awful, horrible series of conflicts that led to the breaking up of Yugoslavia, those memories are still fresh and the wounds too deep. You’d like for sport to be just about sport. Wishful thinking, I know. But politics and soccer have always intertwined, and there are times where sport simply cannot be just about sport, as much as you want it to.

Belgium’s Michy Batshuayi with the worst miss of the tournament

• Every time I saw Panama concede another goal to England, who put six past them and probably could have scored more, I was reminded of the fact that Panama somehow finished above the United States in CONCACAF qualifying, and it made me angry.

• I saw someone online make the point that having a team as bad as Panama in the World Cup was proof that CONCACAF has too many spots in the World Cup. Does that make having a team as bad as Poland in the World Cup proof that UEFA has too many spots? Poland were terrible. Panama is on no points and a difference of -8, but given the garbage that I saw from the Poles, had they had to play England and Belgium, I’m not sure they would have fared much better. I was skeptical of them to begin with, thinking that top seed and top 8 FIFA ranking was smoke and mirrors, but they were awful on Sunday against Colombia. Poland are in the same boat as a few other teams in this tournament in that they have one legit top-class player, Lewandowski, who happens to be a forward, and forwards still need someone to get them the ball, which proved a challenge for Poland and also for the likes to Mo Salah’s Egypt and Son’s South Korea, while a one-horse team like Denmark whose star, Christian Eriksen, is a playmaker can influence the game in other ways.

This pass serves as a reminder that James is really good at football

• For the spectator, this has been the best World Cup that I can ever remember. It’s been wildly entertaining, compelling, dramatic and tense, and it could get even crazier in the next three days. Good. Let’s have that happen. The crazier, the better.

Frauds and Other Foibles

Silky

“Why didn’t you bet the house? We’d have two houses now.”

– Official Spouse of In Play Lose

SIX games in the past two days, four of them ending with a 1:0 scoreline. It feels like 1:0 is the new 0:0. The progressive ways in which VAR are being implemented have added to the goal count, of course, given that there have been a few instances where non-calls have been overturned and penalties awarded, but the offenses seem to have bogged down. Every team that gets a lead seems perfectly happy to try and shut the game down, and those chasing the game seem to lack a cutting edge. I’ve said previously that I believe, 1-32, this field is quite weak, and this is where that fact seems to be rearing its ugly head. Now, a one-off scoreline is not necessarily indicative of that game’s quality. There can be fabulous and compelling 0:0 games and 1:0 games and whatnot. But as a general trend, defensive organization seems to be taking more and more control of this tournament.

Pepe can’t stop, won’t stop flopping

• There are always teams that play well in the World Cup and get nothing out of it. Peru and Morocco both fit that bill this year. It could be argued that, in each of their cases, they were the better team in both of their matches and wound up taking a total of zero points. That’s football. It happens sometimes.
Morocco were subjected to the 90 minutes in the dentist’s chair that is a game against Portugal, who just might be the most annoying team in the world to play at the moment. (That’s a compliment.) Rather than leaving it late to melt down, like they did against Iran, Morocco instead decided to melt down early on, giving up a goal at 4’ on a corner to some unheralded forward named Cristiano Ronaldo. Kid has talent, he might be good some day. After that regrettable defensive error, Morocco then had to chase the game for 86 minutes and got nothing out of it, even though they were by far the better team and the Portuguese did less than zero for the remainder of the match. Regardless of how they looked moving the ball and pressing, no points and no goals is not good enough.
I can’t really say that I was impressed with Portugal in this game, but that’s precisely the point – I’m rarely, if ever, impressed by Portugal, but they’ve become the European master of the ugly win. They’re this zombi team that you just can’t kill. Their games are ugly and awful, and I took a $10 flyer on them in Vegas for a reason.
Peru, meanwhile, threw everything at France after going down a goal and still can’t hit the broad side of a barn. Peru have been great. They’ve tried to play fun, up-tempo proactive football, the red sash is one of the best jerseys ever, and their fans have been one of the hits of the event. But no points and no goals means no mas. It’s too bad, because they’ve been a breath of fresh air.
As for the French, well, blech. I’ll give them credit for being stout defensively, I suppose, and I guess you could step back and look at the big picture and point out that they’ve won two games while playing like trash whereas a number of teams who’ve had designs on this winning this thing have won very few games while playing like trash. But that doesn’t change the fact that the French have been trash. You’d think that a team with a stout defense, with speed on the wings and great finishers up front, would just revel in a game where they got a one-goal lead. You’d expect them to just murder their opponents on the break. But the French couldn’t get out of second gear and wound up pinned in their own end by the Peruvians for much of the second half and clinging to life. What is this nonsense? After that ridiculous LeBron style special in which he announced he was staying at Atleti, Griezmann apparently decided to take his talents to South Beach on vacation, since he’s done next to nothing in two games. At least Giroud gives their aimless offense a center forward to aim at, but the French need to pick up the pace and do the work.

This was not a penalty

• If Peru and Morocco win the Tough Luck award, then Denmark wins the Lucky Stiff award for managing to amass four points while being thoroughly outplayed by first Peru and then the Aussies – the Aussies, for goodness sakes! Denmark have been crap, for the most part, but here they are on the verge of advancing.
The Danes’ strategy appears to be “Christian Eriksen make stuff up and don’t give anything away,” but they aren’t even doing that very well, as they’ve conceded two penalties in as many games – although the second of those, which allowed the Aussies to equalize, was an absolutely terrible call. This was VAR at it’s worst. And I’ve wound up being a VAR apologist here in discussions online, even though I’m generally opposed to replay – not because I’m opposed to the principle of getting the calls right, but because I find replay, in most sports, to be poorly applied.
VAR is never going to be perfect, because officiating in soccer is never going to be perfect. It’s a huge pitch, guys are moving really fast, and everyone is also trying to influence and fool the officials as well, which happens in every sport. (Watched a Houston Rockets game lately?) There are always going to be grey areas, and VAR won’t always help with that. I’d rather we find a way to rid ourselves of the endless arguments about if a guy is or isn’t offside, and VAR’s working on that front in this tournament. But whether hand balls are deliberate or not, whether it’s a foul in the box or not, is never going to be crystal clear, and looking at things in super slo-mo is more likely to confuse the matter, instead of less.
But I was reminded, amid an insufferable argument about whether Messi or Ronaldo is better and the conversation strayed towards Diego Maradona, that a good number of people think of him as a cheat, thanks to The Hand of God. Certainly, among my thousands of good friends in Ireland, they think of Thierry Henry as a cheat, thanks to The Hand of Gaul. And guess what? Had there been VAR in 1986 or 2009, neither of those would have happened. In both cases, it’s guys who were just trying to make a play and the officials missed the call, because officials do that from time to time. Every single foul is play where someone could have gotten away with it, but didn’t.
Ultimately, my feeling is that if we are finding a way to cut out some of the more egregious mistakes, the game will be the better for it. And I admit that I have a low bar for VAR. I wasn’t all that thrilled when I heard they’d use it for this tournament, simply because it hadn’t been tested properly, and the tests had been murky at best. My beloved football club, Norwich City, had a game using VAR during one of the cup competitions, and it wound up being somewhat farcical, with a whole bunch of penalties not being given and a whole bunch of yellow cards being brandished for simulation, when in fact the plays were really somewhere in between. We know what is and isn’t a foul, for the most part, but we’re never going to be sure, I think, when it isn’t or isn’t going to be called.
Ultimately, I’d like them simply to not screw up a game completely and cost a team a win. That hasn’t happened yet, in my opinion. Of the top of my head, I can’t say that any team got a result they didn’t deserve because of VAR. Oh sure, this penalty today going against the Danes was lame, but so were the Danes, for that matter. They flattered to deceive in this 1:1 draw and, if anything, Australia should feel like this match was two points lost.

Just like they drew it up

• I really didn’t understand the lack of urgency from a couple of teams. The Saudis enjoyed a nice, leisurely stroll around the park for 90 minutes in their 1:0 loss to Uruguay, having gifted a goal 25 or so minutes in to Suárez when their keeper flapped at a corner and then proceeded to amble about for the rest of the game, doing nothing against a team that was perfectly content to let them do nothing. I couldn’t understand what the point was of plodding along at such a ponderous pace. You need a goal! You need at least a point! Do something, for god sakes! There comes a point where you have to throw caution to the wind here. Maybe it doesn’t work, maybe you get hammered 5:0 again. So what? You’re going home if you lose. 1:0 is just as bad as 10:0 in that instance. And the Saudis at least possessed the ball a little better, at least, although they could hardly have been worse than they were against the Russians. Everyone on their side did the obligatory falling to the floor in dismay at the end of the match, an action which, given how slowly they played and disinterested they seemed, almost came off as being rehearsed.
And I was extremely puzzled by Iran, who lost 1:0 to Spain in a game which was actually pretty damn exciting in the second half. Iran decided to park the bus in the first half. Well, no, that’s not really true. They parked a bus, a semi, several SUVs, an aircraft, and I think they may have even had a six-mule team in there as well. They got to half level, only to be done in by a fluky goal, an attempted clearance that bounced off Diego Costa’s shin and dribbled into the net.
But a funny thing happened in the second half of this game. Iran had to attack in the second half and, lo and behold, they were pretty good at it – and, more to the point, Spain weren’t very good in the back. Iran had 3-4 golden chances to tie the game, including a goal called back for offsides. That Iran, who who had a 23-game unbeaten streak going, can go forward shouldn’t be a surprise. They’ve got guys on their roster who scored plenty of goals this past season in the Eredivisie and the Greek League – not the top level, of course, but not far from it. Point is, there is attacking talent there, and Spain weren’t exactly stout in the back in their 3:3 draw with Portugal.
So why park the bus? What’s the point? Going into Match Day 2, Iran were leading the group and, with a win in this game, would advance. SO PLAY TO WIN! Maybe it doesn’t work, maybe Spain catch you out and put some past you. Fine. If that happens, and you win the last game vs. Portugal, you’ve advanced! Why leave it late if you can take matters into your own hands now?
Teams at this level win a lot on reputation. The Brazilians have won World Cups where their opponents just refuse to attack them. I was baffled four years ago, by how few teams were willing to run at the Germans when the Germans were very clearly struggling in the back. Take some risks! Don’t be afraid. If you just let the better teams have the ball the whole time, you’re simply asking for them to show off their quality.
One of the problems with parking the bus is that it actually doesn’t work very often. If you play not to lose, you usually do. And Iran looked so good going forward in the second half, and Spain seemed so shaky, that you wonder why it was they didn’t wait until they were behind to start doing it.

And you wonder why Messi hates this team

• Picking Croatia to beat Argentina was my bet the house, bet the farm, bet the farm animals game of the tournament. I’ve been saying for weeks now that Croatia was going to beat Argentina. I said it in my preview the other day. (One of the few things that I have gotten right so far.) This seemed like a no-brainer to me. My reasoning was that Croatia has top-class players at many key positions but most especially in the midfield, where Modric and Rakitic can take over and control the game, while Argentina has been, for the past couple of years, hot garbage. They’ve been hot garbage pretty much since the moment they choked against Chile in the Copa América final in 2016 – the second year in a row they did that, by the way, and coming on the heels of squandering a World Cup final in Brazil in 2014. Argentina barely qualified for this tournament in the first place, needing a hat trick from Messi in the final game in Quito in order to survive – and even that came after they’d gifted Ecuador a goal in the first minute of the game. They were a mess in qualifying, they’ve looked like a mess in the friendlies leading up to the World Cup, and at no point have they looked, sounded, or acted as if they have a coherent plan.
Argentina were a turkey waiting to be carved, and they went so far as to hand over the electric knife to the Croatians after Caballero gave away one of the dumbest goals I’ve ever seen:

And if you’re Argentina, why are you bothering to play out of the back in the first place? Is this or isn’t this part of the vaunted system that Jorge Sampaoli wanted to play? Whatever it is, throw it away. Argentina can’t do it. Quite honestly, Argentina can’t really do anything very well. Sampaoli has managed to make all of these really top-class Argentine players like Messi and Kun Agüero and Higuain and Otamendi, etc., etc., look like a bunch of bewildered Sunday bushers in a pub league.
What was a wild, weird and fun game in the first half – it was somehow 0:0 and somehow both teams still had 11 men on the pitch, neither of which seemed that likely – turned into a joke after Caballero gifted Croatia a goal. The Argentines completely capitulated and resorted just to kicking guys out of frustration and, when that didn’t work, just stood around and watched Croatia rub salt in the wound.
No one knows what they’re doing, where they’re going, or what they’re supposed to be. In both of these games, any time either Iceland or Croatia get the ball into the Argentine half, it’s complete panic time, it’s chaos and mayhem and last-ditch defending. The goalkeeper is not good, the back line is unsettled, the midfield doesn’t work, the wingers keep running into the middle and gumming up the works. It’s a preposterous mess and the entire plan seems to be to just get Messi the ball and wait for him to do something messianic – which didn’t really work against a team that was hell-bent on keeping him from getting the ball. Messi had only 20 touches in the first half, which is ludicrous. He eventually wound up meandering out to the flank just to try and get the ball, but even then, his heart wasn’t in it any more.
Amazingly, Argentina aren’t out of it yet, although they need a whole lot of help in order to advance, and even if they do, god knows how they’ll get anywhere after that. People forget that their success in Brazil in 2014 was perilous. They reached the final that year through winning 1:0 against the Swiss in OT, 1:0 against the Belgians when they scored early and parked the bus, and on penalties against the Dutch after a dreadful 0:0 draw. They weren’t great in that tournament. They were simply good enough. But being good enough means, first and foremost, defending like hell and played like they cared.
Argentina’s performance in this 3:0 defeat today was atrocious. We all want Messi to leave some sort of great legacy for his country, but it’s impossible to do so on a team with no midfield, no defenders, a journeyman goalkeeper, and a bunch of supposedly great attacking players who won’t move, won’t pass to anyone but Messi, and are standing around waiting for him to do something. This team, as constructed, has always been a fraud, but a lot of people didn’t want to believe it.

The World Cup Gets Weird

Who doesn’t love a good diving header?

THE BEST news so far about the World Cup is that we’ve now gotten through all of Match Day 1 in the group phase without a single goalless draw. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been some bad games, of course. I tried to watch a replay of Sweden v. South Korea and jesus was that ever some terrible soccer. And while I understand the tactic that many of the minnows take of parking the bus and hoping a goal will miraculously appear on a counterattack somehow or, failing that, being content for the game to end 0:0, it doesn’t mean that I actually like to see teams playing that way, because it’s really boring. I want to see good players making good plays, not good players standing around in a semicircle trying to figure out how to somehow weave their way through 11 defenders. Such tactics are a necessary evil of the game. A lack of goalless draws means that, in general, such tactics are proving to be unsuccessful.

After Monday’s showing of force by the bigger guns, as the Belgians flexed and the English poured in the goals – except for the part where they didn’t, but we’ll get to that – I thought that Tuesday would be a boring day, but I was wrong. Instead, everyone showed up drunk. Strange plays, surprising results, guys losing their minds. All of it was weird.

The weirdest bit of all might be the fact that Russia is good. I still can’t fathom that the hosts, who were terrible in the run-up, are now as good as advanced to the second round after thrashing Egypt 3:1 on Tuesday. (It’s not official that they have advanced, but Saudi Arabia would need to make up 12 goals of spread in two games, and I’m not sure that team could score 12 goals even if their opponents didn’t bother to field goalkeepers.) Maybe everyone is taking their cue from the hosts, because the Russians are playing proactive, attacking football and have actually been fun to watch. Cynicism has been defeated, for the most part, during the first six days of this event.

Wait, where did you come from?

• Behold one of the strangest goals you’ll ever see. I’ve been watching this sport for more than 40 years and I’ve never seen anything like this before. But it’s a perfectly legal play. Lots of commentators wanted to criticize the way the officials handled it, simply because it’s so bizarre that there must be something wrong with it.
Here’s the situation: Senegal is leading Poland 1-0 and Senegal’s M’Baye Niang has to leave the field with an injury. He waves to indicate he’s ready to return, and the referee waves him back onto the pitch. This is standard procedure. And the referee is obliged to wave him on, because it’s not fair to make the team continue to play a man down any longer than necessary.
But it just so happens that the referee waves Niang back on at the exact moment that the Poles lose their minds. None of them are paying attention to him, and their midfielder inexplicably decides to try some ridiculous back pass to his goalkeeper from 65 yards away, which bounces aimlessly in no-man’s land and Niang is the first to the ball. There is no offsides on this sort of play, and Niang is onside, anyway. The defender is completely baffled by this sudden presence of an attacker, the keeper comes screaming out of the net because he has to, but neither Polish player can get there in time and Niang can just walk the ball into the goal.
It’s one of the weirdest goals I’ve ever seen, but it’s a completely legal play. Combine this with an own goal, and Poland might be feeling a bit star-crossed after losing 2:1 to Senegal. The truth is, though, that Poland were basically dreadful for most of this game, creating almost no good chances while being thoroughly outplayed. You can’t really complain about losing on a strange goal when the main reason it occurred is that you didn’t pay attention to the details.

My, didn’t this game ever change in a hurry

• Carlos Sanchez just needed to let the ball go. Let it go. So you give up a goal. There are 87 minutes left in the game. Just let it go.
Which, to be fair, is somewhat counterintuitive. Being behind a goal, in a game where it can be really damn hard to score a goal, seems like a disaster. But deliberately handling the ball to stop a goal is a red-card offense, and also a penalty kick, so not only are you most likely giving up a goal, but you’re also down to 10 men.
There is, in fact, a time and place to do this sort of thing. Recall the Quarter Finals in 2010 in South Africa when, at the very end of a tied game, Luis Suárez did that for Uruguay against Ghana. But he had literally no choice in that instance. He has to do that. If he doesn’t do it, Ghana win it at the death, it’s game over and Uruguay goes home. As it turned out, Ghana missed the penalty, and Uruguay went on to win and advance. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
But three minutes into your first game of the World Cup is not desperate times. Sure, the Colombian defense made a hash out of the play and Japan was going to score. Fine. Let them score. Play the next play.
But instead, Sanchez blocks the shot with his arm and gets red-carded, Japan converts the penalty, Los Cafeteros are both down a goal and down to 10 men, and then they get to spend the next 87 minutes chasing the game and trying to get a result, because whereas if this happened to your club team in some meaningless mid-season game, at which point you’d just chalk it up as a loss and move on, you don’t have time for that in the World Cup. You need all the points you can get and you need them now. This dumb play not only cost Colombia dearly in the game, but the result threatens to derail their entire World Cup campaign.
Colombia actually did well to draw level in the first half, but they ran out of gas and Japan ultimately found a winner late on. And it’s amazing what being a man up for 87 minutes will do for team morale. Japan have been completely dysfunctional in the run-up to the World Cup. They just fired their coach two months ago, they’ve played terrible and looked terrible and not even the most strident Blue Samurai fans believed this team was going to do anything at all. But here they are essentially gifted with three points, which is about 2-3 more than anyone thought they’d get in the entire tournament.
So the Colombians made a mess, and the Poles made a mess, and now the two Group H favorites are basically playing a loser-out game up next. Good luck with that.

Bang

• Can we please stop grading on a curve? If a team sets out to do nothing – and I mean it is their actual game plan to do nothing – and then they accomplish that, don’t give them any plaudits, because the most likely reason they’re doing that is because they’re trash. I had to listen to so much of this crap from the announcers during the Panama game with Belgium on Monday. “Oh look? Panama almost did something! Isn’t that great?” Just stop it. They weren’t any good. You can’t convince me otherwise.
The Belgians goofed off in the first half, wound up scoreless and then decided to do some Belgian things after the intermission, starting with Mertens hitting this slick volley from the angle, followed by De Bruyne making a sublime diagonal pass to a diving Lukaku for a second goal. I still have no idea what the hell Roberto Mártinez is trying to do with his formation for that team, as he’s got forwards playing wing back and neither of them can defend, and he’s also got De Bruyne playing as a six, which doesn’t make any sense, either, seeing how he’s the best passer in the entire Premier League and needs to be in the attacking third to maximize that skill. It still doesn’t make sense, but so long as you have so many guys capable of doing the spectacular, it might not actually matter.

Whee!

• Of all the dumb things that England did during the Euros in 2016, almost certainly the dumbest was having Harry Kane take corners. Kane is one of the great scorers on the planet and he does no good standing in the corner 35 yards from the goal. Both of England’s goals in their 2:1 win over Tunisia on Monday were set pieces where Kane’s involvement weren’t the primary action. Instead, he’s a part of a bunch formation on both and basically slips a screen amid the distraction of the primary play, working his way into open space. That sense of timing and instinct is not really coachable. When you have it, don’t waste it.
England did their best to mess this game up, conceding a stupid penalty at 35’ which enabled Tunisia to level after completely dominating the game up to the point. England could have been up three or four or even five if not for the clownshoes finishing by the likes of Lindgard and Sterling. The penalty – which was a bad play by Walker in which he looked like he had no idea what he was doing, no idea where the ball was, and he caught a Tunisian player with an elbow – gave a few people a reason to bitch and moan about the officiating, since they thought it was a soft penalty, but tough shit. Play through it. Play better. Stop missing golden chances.
And, to England’s credit, they got the late winner and a deserved result. The supposed golden generation which brought you so many disappointments like finishing last in their group in 2014 and choking away a win over the U.S. in 2010 have mercifully been rendered irrelevant and confined to the dustbin of history. England are now actually fun. I can’t believe that I’m saying that. They’re very attack-minded, they have speed and youth and actual talent, for a change. They’re fun to watch and I’m starting to think could do pretty well in this tournament.
How well they do, of course, will likely come down to the result of their game with the Belgians – a game which I’m certain is going to involve some chicanery, because at that point, the entire road map for the knockout stages will be laid out for both teams, and as it stands right now, the winner of the group could be playing Brazil or Germany in the Quarters, while the runner-up could be playing Mexico or Serbia or Switzerland. Hmm, who would you rather play? It could make for a really strange game where both teams are trying to mess it up somehow without making it look like they’re trying to mess it up. I could see the Belgians just run over and clatter into an English guy in the box in order to concede a penalty, only to then see the English penalty go flying into the heavens. It could be comedy gold.

B- Work

Gorgeous

I’M GIVING myself a B- for my World Cup viewing performance this weekend, as I managed to watch about 5½ of the 7 games. I watched the first 35 minutes of Croatia-Nigeria before I fell asleep, and it was all I needed to see. Having dragged my ass in front of the TV at 3:00 a.m. for France v. Australia, and spent the entire first half wondering why I had bothered, I couldn’t find the enthusiasm required to get up at 5:00 a.m. today for Costa Rica-Serbia. From what I understand, I didn’t miss much. I was hoping to watch all seven, so I came up short on that front. A solid effort on my part, but I could have done better.

The five games that I did watch in full proved quite fascinating. Four of them featured teams who are considered to be among the favorites, and all four of them played badly, to varying degrees. It was also the first time that the VAR system came into play and, so far, it’s going okay. The two VAR-awarded penalties may have been somewhat soft, but by the letter of the law, both were ultimately ruled correctly. Given the gravity of an awarded penalty – a play which results in a goal about 75% of the time in a sport where scoring otherwise seems to be damned impossible – the more objectivity involved in that decision-making process, the better. I’m also liking the way the offsides are being called – or not being called, in fact, as FIFA’s directive to linesmen is to keep the flag down on close calls and let it play out. If there is a goal in the ensuing sequence of moves, they’ll go back and review it. This means fewer whistles and fewer stoppages in play, which is a good thing. And you don’t have to worry about those ensuing sequence of moves resulting in a goal, anyway, because soccer is a game that’s all about failure and disappointment:

A new fan learns the game’s harsh reality

And it’s impossible to ignore all of the penalties in Saturday’s games – five of them in four games. The penalty kick in soccer probably has more impact and effect on a game than any other play in any other sport – and, as we saw on Saturday, missing one can be disastrous. With so much tied to a single play, it’s very easy to focus and fixate all of your energies upon it, often attaching far more meaning to it than you probably should. Peru didn’t lose a game on Saturday because they missed a penalty. They lost because they missed 20-odd chances in the game – the penalty being the most golden of opportunities, of course, but not the only one they had. They lost because and defense fell asleep and conceded a Danish goal on a counterattack. They lost because, for some bizarre reason, their head coach left Paolo Guerrero – their captain, top scorer, and best player – out of the starting XI, a decision which was made to look even worse when Peru missed a penalty, since it would have been Guerrero taking the penalty if he’d been on the pitch. But missing that penalty will be all that anyone will want to talk about, it will be all that people will remember. Ask Peruvians about that loss in a few years and the first thing they’ll think of is a missed penalty. This is the nature of the game. Moments change matches, and moments become metaphors.

We have lift-off ...

• Christian Cueva single-handedly founding the Peruvian space agency by launching this spot kick into orbit summed up the joy turned to frustration of a nation that’s intent upon celebrating this World Cup like none other. Peruvians have waited 36 years for this, 36 long years. They bought enormous numbers of tickets and have turned out en masse in Russia for the event, only to be reminded, once again, that soccer is a cruel and stupid game. 
The Peruvians played so well. Atop their usual stout defense, they played an attacking game with athleticism and speed. They dominated the game whereas Denmark did very little of anything, but the ball just wouldn’t go in the goal. And then Cueva misses the penalty in a scoreless game and everyone starts to feel uneasy. And then they get caught upfield and Denmark springs a counter, and Denmark happens to have the best player on the pitch in Christian Eriksen – who was having a lousy game by his standards – and Eriksen slots a perfect pass on an odd rush and now Peru’s down a goal when they should probably be up two or three. This game sucks. And Peru’s throwing everything at them, chance after chance after chance but the goddamn ball won’t go in the goddamn goal!
Peru were the better team and they lost. That’s football. Sometimes, the better team doesn’t win. If you want life to be fair, don’t play this stupid game. Peru desperately needed to win this game in order to advance, as Denmark was their prime competition for the second spot. Then again, they do have a game against the French so there might be hope, since the French decided to make this stupid game even stupider by playing stupidly.

What on earth are you doing?

• Samuel Umtiti’s nitwitted attempt at volleyball gifted the Australians a penalty at 61’ of a 1:0 game, coming seven minutes after France were awarded, through VAR, a penalty which was so soft and fluffy that not even the French seemed to think it should have been given. The 22 players on the pitch were just sort of standing there after the VAR review, looking to one-another with confused shrugs. Sure, it was the right call by the letter of the law, but it just didn’t feel like it should have been called, and had the call not been changed and the penalty awarded, I’m not sure the French would have been bothered. Umtiti’s brazen act of lunacy, coming fresh off France gaining a lead they wholly didn’t deserve, felt karmically just, as it permitted the Aussies to even the score.
Paul Pogba eventually bundled one over the line to give France a 2:1 victory, and it’s hard for me to say they didn’t deserve the win. This is because Australia didn’t deserve anything, because they didn’t do anything. In fact, their whole goal was to do nothing. I certainly understand the tactic inferior teams take of parking the bus and then trying to hit the opposition on the break, but I don’t think they reached the French penalty area more than a half-dozen times throughout the entire game, and they also kept needlessly giving the ball away in dumb areas of the pitch – needless in the sense that it wasn’t like they were under duress, seeing as how the French couldn’t be bothered to actually press. Soccer is a game where you can actually succeed by trying to do nothing, of course, but that the Socceroos were unified, hell-bent and committed to doing nothing doesn’t earn them any plaudits from me. Frankly, they were garbage.
But so were the French, who are presently an incoherent mess. They have tonnes of offensive talent,  they speed and size and athleticism in spades, but no one wants to do anything when they don’t have the ball at their feet, and other than Pobga, they don’t have any good passers. For a team with so many good attackers, they create surprisingly few goals and scoring chances. Even so, they’d have probably scored four or five in this game simply by putting some pressure on the Aussies and making them cough up the ball even easier than they already were, but the French just couldn’t find it in them to do that. I’m not sure how much of the wayward act of wandering through the desert that poses for the French team comes down to head coach Didier Deschamps not having a coherent plan, and how much comes down to the players not wanting to listen to him.
Now, to be fair here, playing a team intent on doing nothing can be surprisingly difficult, because it’s not any fun at all. I suspect the French are likely to improve when they face some opponents who actually want to play. But if you’re the Danes or the Peruvians, why would you give them that chance?

Birdseye view of bad defense

• Steven Zuber’s equalizer gave the Swiss a point against Brazil, canceling out Coutinho’s brilliant first half goal. Zuber did give the defender in front of him a good shove on this play, and the Brazilians sort of half-heartedly complained once they saw the replay on the big screen in the stadium, but this was just bad defense. HE’S UNMARKED INSIDE THE SIX! Hey you, you two guys on the right side, how about you try marking someone? In most Brazil sides, the central defense is the soft underbelly, but this wasn’t some bruising center forward imposing his will. This was just a pathetic effort by Brazil to mark a basic set piece play.
Seleção played 20 good minutes to start, capped off with Coutinho’s beautiful curling shot from the left elbow to give them the lead, but then they stopped playing. For the majority of the next hour, the Swiss were the better team. And props to the Swiss for that, but Brazil should never not be the better team against a side as limited as the Swiss.
Now, this team is obviously better than the dross Brazil put out there in their last three major tournaments, but this “new look” Brazilian team, for all of it’s flair, is still overly dependent upon Neymar, who is coming back from a broken foot and still doesn’t look fully fit. It was hard to tell at times, of course, since he spent so much of the game on the floor, what with him being fouled 10 times. This was a really disappointing performance for Seleção. A good Brazil makes this tournament special. We want more from them than this.

Boom

• Congratulations to El Tri for doing what every team who has played the Germans should have been doing for the past four years – run at them! What annoyed me four years ago about so many of Germany’s games was the fact that so few teams were willing to take that risk, allowing the Germans to conceal the fact that they were somewhat slow and square in the back. But one of the characteristics of these group openers that often shows up is that, given that you have six months’ time to plan for your first opponent, a good coach can figure out the best way to attack them.
As presently constructed, the Germans like to possess the ball and tend to use their overly-aggressive fullbacks to make deep runs, so Osorio came up with a great game plan – when the defense stands up the Germans, the immediate outlet is to a center forward just in front of the Germans’ two in the midfield, who then turns and faces and feeds whichever channel the German fullback has vacated, at which point the break is on and EVERYONE RUN LIKE HELL!
The Mexicans just killed Germany in transition. The deeper the Germans got into Mexican territory, the larger the open space the Mexicans had to run into on the break. The 1:0 final scoreline somewhat flattered the Germans, because the Mexicans messed up so many odd-man rushes over the course of 90 minutes. It got somewhat tense towards the end, as the Mexicans closed ranks and played to protect the lead, but any kind of result the Germans may have gotten would have been undeserved.
I’m hard-pressed to ever remember a German team that was such a mess. They looked slow, old, and unathletic. Their entire midfield collective was a net negative – Khedira was terrible, Muller was terrible, Özil was nonexistent but at least he knew to track back 70 yards and try to defend Lozano on the Mexican goal as opposed to Kimmich, the right back, who was … where exactly?
And while the outcome was still a surprise, it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. As mysterious and muddled and maddening as El Tri can sometimes be – they’d used 48 different line-ups in 48 previous games – they still have the sort of dynamic, intelligent forwards and athletic wings who could theoretically make life miserable for the Germans, if only you allow them to do so. I like to give El Tri some shit here on the blog from time to time, given that we’re rivals and all, but I’ve had far more faith in this version of El Tri than most. This is a good team who just put themselves in a great position to go far in this tourney. (Now watch them go out and go 0:0 with South Korea and mess it all up.)

The smiting shall continue until morale improves

• You know who else is good? Iceland. Can we stop it already with all of the plucky underdog narratives? If I hear one more time about how they are the smallest nation ever to participate in a World Cup, I’m going to reach through the TV and smack the announcer. If you honestly thought that Iceland getting a 1:1 draw against Argentina was a surprise, then you haven’t been paying attention for the past six years.
That’s because Iceland have been good for the past six years. They sowed the seeds for this when their U-21 team reached the UEFA final in 2011. Had they not been reduced to 10 men against Croatia for 80 minutes, and managed to scrounge an away goal in Zagreb in the return leg of the 2013 playoff, they’d have been in the World Cup four years ago and we’d have been hearing all of these plucky Iceland stories while they were playing in Brazil. Reaching the quarters at the 2016 Euros wasn’t a fluke, beating England wasn’t a fluke, winning their UEFA qualifying group for this World Cup wasn’t a fluke. THIS TEAM IS GOOD!
Like I was saying before about well-coached teams having ample time to prepare for an opponent, Iceland new exactly what they were going to do in this game. They were going to zone up, run at Messi in numbers, stay on their feet while defending to avoid needless fouls, and then play through Gylfi Sigurðsson on the counter. They got a bit narrow in the second half, with Argentina’s wingers pinching up, and that prevented them breaking, but other than when Messi had the ball and threatened with his left foot, Iceland weren’t actually all that uncomfortable while defending. They didn’t care if they conceded a corner, because they’re huge and dominant in the air. They knew what they were doing.
Not only should it not have been a surprise that Iceland were level with Argentina, but they probably should have been disappointed with the fact that they hadn’t put two or even three past Argentina in the first half. If anything, I think Iceland were how surprised at how easy it was to go forward.
But if you listen to the nimrods and dipshits at Fox Sports tell it, the idea they would possibly beat Argentina would the greatest upset in the history of sliced bread. This is what happens when you don’t pay attention. God, I hate those telecasts. Thank goodness for Telemundo.

But inevitably, the story of this game was the fact that, in the 63rd minute, Messi missed a penalty. He also couldn’t convert a free kick in the dying seconds. These things happen. In his career in his Argentina shirt, Messi converts 77% of his penalties, which is about an average number. But he’s missed a couple of big ones, of course, most recently the decider in the 2016 Copa América Centenario final against the Chileans. Both for club and country, he’s gone into slumps from time to time where he’s missed some. That happens.
Problem #1 with this, of course, is that no one on that team – be they a coach, a player, or whomever – would ever say, “so, hey, Leo, how about we let Kun Agüero take the penalties? He’s pretty good at them.” This is sort of like how, on frequent occasions in the NBA playoffs, LeBron was stepping up to shoot free throws on technical fouls, even though there were three 85-90% foul shooters on the floor. Good luck prying the ball away from him. This is what happens when your team is so dependent upon one guy. You’ll defer to him even when you know that you shouldn’t.
And Argentina completely defers to Messi in everything they do. The others just basically stand around and wait for him to do something. Messi’d get the ball on the right elbow, with three or even four Iceland defenders running at him, and he’d always have to circle back to shoot from a worse angle, or pass it back to a midfielder and reset the play, because everyone in a black shirt had become a statue. Move, damn it! Messi is one of the best passers in the world, for christsake. Give him a goddamn target!
The problem with Messi missing a penalty and generally having a subpar game (by his standards) is that it came one day after Christiano Ronaldo scored a hat trick against Spain and converted a penalty and a free kick and what have you. This revives the dumbest of all arguments in sports about which of the two is better. I couldn’t care less about this and find it tiresome. I think they’re both amazing and I enjoy them both as players.
But CR7 has one built in advantage in that argument, which is where he was born. CR7 was born in a small country with a good, but not great, footballing tradition. Every single thing he does for his country, therefore, is a feather in his cap. Messi happens to come from a nation that not only is rich in footballing tradition and used to win a lot of stuff, but it’s one where the people have grown impatient, if not intolerant, of the fact that they no longer win a lot of stuff. Argentina hasn’t won a major tournament in 25 years. They’ve not won a World Cup since 1986. They were losing stuff long before Messi, and given the dysfunctional state of the Argentine FA, they’ll likely be losing stuff after Messi.
Argentina doesn’t win anything and it’s always Messi’s fault. Somehow it’s Messi’s fault that they haven’t produced a decent playmaker in a decade, which means he has to drop back and spend the game setting up teammates who squander chances. It was Messi’s fault that they drew 1:1 with Iceland, and not the fault of his teammates, none of whom, with the exception of Kun Agüero, played worth a goddamn. It’s somehow Messi’s fault that the defense got spooked literally every time Iceland had the ball. It’s Messi’s fault that the goalkeeper is flapping and flailing like he’s swatting at bees.
It’s a team game, folks, and Argentina’s likely going to be going home earlier than they’d hope because the team surrounding Messi isn’t very good. And the LeBron comparison from before is apt, because even this year, when the Cleveland Cavaliers were crap, there were still people out there thinking he’d magically be able to beat the Warriors all by himself, some of whom are now killing him for the fact that he couldn’t. Argentina are in the Group of Death in this tournament. Messi can’t singlehandedly beat seven good teams in a row by himself. But somehow, when he doesn’t do that, it’ll be his fault. It’s completely, utterly dumb. It’s no surprise he frequently wants to quit playing for the national team, and has done so in the past. Who wants to put up with that crap?

Whew, that was a lot of soccer to watch. Three more games tomorrow, including my nutty Belgians. I didn’t quite make it through the footballing marathon this weekend, but I did well enough to earn a passing grade. And at some point, I should probably sleep.