And One More Thing ...

How appropriate

THE LOSE didn’t have the chance to write about the World Cup Final the other day, owing to having some work obligations. Apologies for that, and thanks to the many people who’ve made it a point to visit this space over the course of the past month. I always enjoy writing about the World Cup, finding it to be the single-most compelling sporting event on the planet, one whose meanings and metaphors often transcend the game of soccer itself.

But, of course, the final game itself is often bad. It’s usually bad, in fact. It’s tense, it’s tight, players are nervous, the tactics are cagy, the pace ponderously slow. There hasn’t been a truly good final in more than 30 years before this past Sunday, when France defeated Croatia 4:2 in a game which embodied the entire tournament. There were set piece goals, a goal from a penalty kick, a VAR controversy, another tally for vaunted striker Own Goal, the play was generally progressive and attack-minded, the game was competitive but generally disciplined, the underdogs took no shit and played like hell, and there were goals galore. It’s about all that you could ever want in a final.

Was it ‘great’ in terms of play? Well, yes and no. There were mistakes galore, some of them of the jaw-dropping variety – what are you doing, Hugo Lloris? – but I ultimately judge matches by how exciting and entertaining they are, and this year’s final (and the tournament as a whole) left me wildly entertained. Frankly, playing well is overrated a lot of the times in the game of soccer. It’s a game, more than any other, where playing really well will frequently not make a damn bit of difference.

And Croatia were great. They were great in that first half and the first 15 minutes after break. Quite honestly, if the Belgians had approached the semi final in the manor that the Croatians approached the final, Belgium probably would have wound up beating France and winning the damn World Cup. I’m still annoyed about that, even though my winning Las Vegas ticket will cushion the blow:

Viva Las Vegas, baby

And early on in the game, The Official Spouse of In Play Lose actually asked me, “which side are you rooting for,” since I was applauding the Croatians for their efforts. More than anything, I wanted a good game. I didn’t want to sit through another 90 minutes in a dentist’s chair that was France playing pragmatic soccer.

But where was I? Oh, right, the Croatians were great. Their spacing was terrific, they used the full width of the pitch to great effect, they pressed the French high and were committed full-bore to attacking. It was one helluva risk to do that, of course, but it was also the right strategy. It’s what Croatia does best. They have a whole stableful of fantastic players going forward. It’d be stupid to be cautious and minimize those talents. So the Croatians pushed high and pressed the French and really controlled the game. The French defense looked pretty shaky at times, and more than a few lethal Croatian passes fizzed through the box and came perilously close to their desired target. Croatia were all over them for the first 60 minutes.

And they were losing, 2-1, because soccer is a stupid fucking game sometimes.

And to blame both of the goals entirely on the officiating is, well, simplistic. The first goal was an own goal from Mandžukič as he defended a set piece given for a foul on Griezmann that was clearly a flop. It was a flop. It was a bad call, but guess what, bad calls happen all of the time. There are plenty of free kicks given out for bad calls that don’t result in a goal. So play the next play! Defend the set piece! And for godsakes, don’t score on yourselves in the process! The second goal, coming at 1-1 after a spectacular volley by Perisič to equalize, came from a penalty that was, well, by letter of the law probably the right call, but one which would have bothered no one if it hadn’t been given. That sucks. That’s just a tough break, and those happen from time to time. What’s lost in the discussion of whether or not it was a penalty is the fact that the penalty stemmed from a French corner, which stemmed from Vida aimlessly, sloppily shanking a ball over the end line. One play always leads to another, and Vida’s bumbled clearance is what started this whole mess. So yeah, the officials played a part in these two goals, but Croatia also contributed to its own demise, which is what usually happens.

And mistakes happen all the time, of course, but the point here is that, as the underdogs, the Croatians had such a small margin of error when it came to winning this game. France had barely got a kick in during the first 15 minutes, then they get one opportunity and boom, the  Croatians are down a goal. All of their excellent work, their precise passing, their adherence to a solid strategy and game plan, came undone in just a couple of moments here and there, both of which went against the run of play. This is why soccer is a stupid game sometimes. Moments change matches, for better and, often, for worse.

But we should love the Croatians for going for it, for not trying to sit back and play it safe. It’s the World Cup final, damn it. You’re the underdogs! Take some risks! And Croatia doubled down and went hell-bent for leather in the second half. It was breathtaking to watch, with the action going end-to-end at a frenzied pace.

At which point the French said, “oh, you want to run with us? How cute,” and then did this and this. Game over.

And that’s just mean. That’s just nasty. That’s the killer instinct, the next gear. That’s Tom Brady throwing two TD’s on consecutive possessions sandwiched around a three-and-out. That’s the Warriors going on a 22-2 run to start the third quarter. That’s “we’re better than you, and we’re going to kill you, and we don’t care who you are.” It’s that sort of display of talent we all want to see, but dread when it happens. I’ve been annoyed with the French during this tourney because we don’t see it enough. They get down a goal against Argentina and score three in 20 minutes. They have the Croatians running at them and taking it to them and then they go scorched earth and end it all. It seemingly takes being legitimately threatened in order for that switch to be flipped and that talent to be unleashed.

I thought the Croatians were terrific in this game. They played with class and they were worthy adversaries to a team which were, in the end, a worthy champion. And France had to win this game. Remember, they lost two years ago on home soil in the finals of the Euros. Lose two straight finals, and some hack with a blog about failure is likely to brand you a bunch of choking dogs. There was legit pressure on this team, and not winning this game would have been seen as nothing other than an enormous failure.

But the French are worthy winners, and we should just get used to them winning all the things from now on, because they were one of the youngest teams in the tournament and still have room to improve. With Varane and Umtiti, they found their center back pairing for the next two World Cups. Pogba played, and behaved, like the future captain of this team that everyone knows he can be. Mbappé, meanwhile, is only 19 years old, he’s humble and well-spoken and exceptionally generous, and he’s one of those unique talents who has literally no limit to what he is capable of doing. He embodies pretty much everything that’s good about the game. He can win everything, as far as I’m concerned. Ballon d’Ors, World Cups, you name it. Go ahead and win all of it. Soccer is moving away from the world of Messi and Ronaldo and into the world of Mbappé. In that regards, the game is obviously in excellent hands.

Not only is this French team ridiculously young for a championship side, but there is room to grow. Deschamps, whom I figured would be fired by now, did a marvelous job coaching this team, all of whom bought into his plan. But they can get better. Deschamps knows it, the players know it. They can be more dynamic, more decisive, and they struck me as a group that is not all that interested in resting on their laurels. They want to get better. This could get really terrifying in the future.

The main reason to be excited about the French is that not only are they barely scratching the surface of their abilities on the pitch, but they are only beginning to wade into their pool of talent. They have more young players in the pipeline, as Paris is the richest talent pool on earth right now. The French are producing enough good players to field entire national teams for other countries: we’ve seen multiple African nations now throw out World Cup sides made up predominantly of members of the diaspora who’ve grown up in the French system (a fact whose long-term impact on CAF football is yet to be determined, but will likely be substantial). There will be more. Lots more. Success is never a guarantee, of course, but the French are well-positioned to dominate international soccer for the next decade.

Not only is France going to keep producing players, but their national team is likely to keep looking like this one does – and this is important to remember, in this age of xenophobia and intolerance. France’s players had their pick of nations for which to play, and they chose to play for France. Pogba could have played for Guinea; Kante could have played for Mali; Mbappé has parents from Cameroon and Algeria, etc., etc. Even a white kid like Griezmann is a child of immigrants. Football runs so deep because, in some way or another, it reflects the true nature of a society – whether or not you want to admit it. It was French striker Karim Benzema who said, “when I score goals, I’m French, and when I don’t, I’m an Arab.” France’s national football team is half-Muslim, more than half-black, and all of those guys were out there shouting, “Vive la France! Vive la republique!” once the World Cup match was over. They are proud to be French, and France should be proud to have them, and have those who are like them.

The World Cup was once the undisputed pinnacle of the game. This has changed, over time, mostly due to the fact that the entire world has integrated. Talent moves from nation to nation, coaching ideas travel across the globe. When I first started watching the World Cup, back in 1982, this rarely happened, so there was a sense of mystery and intrigue about the proceedings. One of the fascinations of that 1982 tourney was that the 19-year-old wünderkind, Diego Maradona, was set to join F.C. Barcelona after the event was over – and a South American venturing to play in Europe was scarce at that time. There was a mystery and an intrigue, an element of the unknown to the proceedings. You knew a side of domestic Brazilians would be good, but you didn’t know just how good they would be.

That uncertainty has been lost, of course, in this day and age. Every great player is plying his trade in Europe somewhere. There are no secrets or golden nuggets waiting for the World Cup to be unearthed. And with integration has come a homogenization of tactics and of techniques. Most everyone plays in a relatively similar way, with only minor tactical variance. It’s really a question now of just how organized you can be. It’s no surprise so many goals in this tourney were scored on set pieces, since set pieces are about all a national team has time to practice for these days.

But I challenge someone to find something better. And no, the Champions League is not better. Some cup tourney where the 3rd-best team in Spain is playing the 4th-best team in England in the final is not the pinnacle of the game. Seriously, go back and watch the Real-Bayern semis from this year’s Champions League, in which two teams with hundreds of millions of euros of talent produced 180 minutes of the most comically awful football imaginable. I don’t know where you’re going to find the ‘best’ of the game, as best is this nebulous concept which lacks definition. Club football rules the calendar year, but I’ll take the World Cup any time. I’ll take the passion and the drama, the resourcefulness among its coaches, the pride and the desire. Give me that any day.

This was nothing short of the best World Cup I’ve ever seen, in terms of day-in, day-out drama and competitiveness. The minnows gave zero fucks and felt like they could punch the big guys in the mouth and challenge them to a street fight. We had tension, we had high drama, we had the throwing of caution to the wind time and again. For consistently fun and energetic and exciting play, this was as good as I can remember. In most of the confederations there have been efforts to try to maintain interest in the international game (including the UEFA Nations League debuting this fall, which sounds ridiculous, but who knows?), but I think the World Cup showed that the international game is alive and well. Not even the largesse and bombast and arrogance of FIFA has managed to kill it quite yet. In time, they still might – that time being this nonsense in 2022 if it actually comes to pass – but if anything, what this event in Russia showed is that those who grossly mismanage the game can, and often are, saved both by those who decide to play it.

It’s Going Home

Croatia need to wear the checkers tomorrow, which is one of the coolest looks in sports

THE CONSOLATION game of the World Cup is always enjoyable to watch – far more enjoyable than the final, in fact. The final has all of the tension and the drama, of course, but the consolation game usually has far better actual play, and there is usually plenty of goals. Belgium’s 2:0 win over England was, in fact, the lowest-scoring consolation game since 1974. Even so, it was a pretty spirited encounter and both teams took it seriously – doing so in part, I suspect, because they all know each other so well. It was basically a Premier League all-star game out there, with quite a lot of club teammates on either side. Guys like to beat their enemies, of course, but they love to beat their friends.

It’s always a relaxed game and, in the moment, an enjoyable one – albeit one that almost no one cares about. Seriously, no one cares whether you finish third or fourth in the World Cup. Don’t believe me? Okay, quick trivia question here: there are 11 countries whose best finish in the World Cup is either third or fourth. Name them. Go. (No looking it up.) You can’t do it. Probably a lot of people don’t even remember that the Netherlands beat Brazil 3:0 to finish third four years ago. It doesn’t really matter. No one cares. But it’s a chance to have some fun, play without any pressure, and whichever team can muster up enough motivation amid their bitter disappointment at being there can have the tournament end on something of a high note.

And in the abstract, of course, both the Belgians and the English accomplished a lot. If you’d told them six months ago they’d wind up reaching the semifinals of the World Cup, they’d have thought about that and said it sounded like a success. The problem, of course, is in the immediate: having only reached the semifinal means that you didn’t win it. Obviously, in the moment, it feels like a failure.

And given how the tournament shook out, it’s easy to say that both of these teams will rue the final outcome and consider it an opportunity lost. The usual powerhouses all fell by the wayside. (Or, in the case of Italy and the Dutch, didn’t even make it to the tournament.) The Germans were garbage. When have the Germans ever been garbage? The Argentines were a hot mess. Spain was disjointed, knee-deep in distractions. Brazil underachieved and never found another gear. If neither Belgium nor England could win this World Cup, when both were, in my opinion, good enough to do so, then when are they ever going to win it?

• And yeah, I know England’s won before, 1966 and blah blah, I’m aware of this fact. I was made very well aware of this with all of the “football’s coming home” nonsense. English fans are very good when it comes to talking about ancient history, given that so much of the recent past has been rubbish. Well, guess what? It isn’t coming home.
And I’m not trying to mock the Three Lions faithful here, because I’m a fan as well, and have been for a long time. I enjoyed seeing them do well in this tournament. A good England side makes the world game better. It’s just that the expectations are always so out of whack that, until this year anyway, you never get the sense that anyone playing for England is all that happy to be doing it. Playing for England has all of the appeal of going to a Thanksgiving dinner with the relatives you don’t like who all bring casseroles – it’s a trying affair and it never tastes good.
But England was fun this year, a young team who, unfortunately, showed their youth and inexperience at the wrong time. After getting the lead early on against Croatia, their front line let them down and they couldn’t get that second goal. Hell, they could barely get a shot on goal, for goodness sakes. This was a recurring theme for England in this tournament. Before Saturday’s consolation game, through 600 minutes of game time, England had as many shots on goal in open play – six – as Saudi Arabia had in 270 minutes. Almost all of their goals were the result of set pieces which, while you want to do them well, wasn’t in keeping with the way they wanted to play. Teams like Iceland live and die with set pieces because they’re always bunkering down. If you want to play an expansive, attacking style, you’ve got to be capable of creating chances in open play.
But England couldn’t really do that, because they lack the sorts of passers that a team like, say, Croatia have, and even though they were down a goal, the Croatian midfield started to boss the game. England’s response was to try and play over the top and avoid the midfield entirely, hoofing it long repeatedly but to no effect. Once Croatia got a foothold, you could sense that the equalizing goal was coming, and that they would then figure out a way to win the game after that.
And people haven’t given Croatia enough credit. That is one savvy side, and that team is tough as hell. They came from down a goal in three straight knockout matches to win, playing 120 minutes in all of them, which speaks to some incredible resiliency. Even so, at 70’ up a goal, England has got to win that game. Keep the shape, manage the clock, use your speed and your youthful legs to see the game out. But instead, it was England who were looking fatigued at the end, having been forced to chase while Croatia maintained control of the game and the flow.
And can people stop it already with the narrative about what a small country Croatia is? You don’t need 50,000,000 players. You need 11 guys who know what they’re doing. It can be argued, in fact, that it’s easier to produce good players in a smaller country, because it’s easier to implement a comprehensive development system in a smaller space – but even that doesn’t really work in the case of Croatia, whose second-best player, Rakitić, actually grew up in Switzerland. Sometimes, there’s no real logic to it. This is why reproducing results, over time, can seem impossible. When it comes to player development, there is never any guarantee of success.
England’s got a bright future for themselves, as they have a young team that can learn from this experience, and they have even more young players in the pipeline, as England are currently the world champions at both the U-17 and U-20 levels. The problem is, though, that a lot of that good young talent is likely to be squandered in the Premier League. I’ve heard the argument before that England’s not any good because not enough Englishmen play in the Premier League, which both is and isn’t true. It’s not the job of the clubs in the Premier League to develop young players for England. They have more money to spend than they know what to do with, and they’re going to spend it worldwide. The biggest clubs in England are already redundant at most positions. They don’t have room on the roster for most kids, nor do they have the time.
So what do you do if you’re a young player stuck on the reserve side for one of England’s big clubs? Go find a game. You need to play, you need to compete, you need to learn through getting your head bashed in by the big stars and growing from the experience. There is so much talent in the EPL, both on the pitch and on the sidelines, from which to learn and grow and improve. Can’t get in the side at Man City or Arsenal? Go to Bournemouth, go to Southampton, go to Newcastle or Leicester or Huddersfield or some such, just get out there and play and learn. Those bigger opportunities will ultimately come.
And I think there are going to be more opportunities for The Three Lions as well, but now it is a question of whether or not patience can prevail, or if the expectations of more success will become too great.

• Before we go any further here, there is a podcast which I want to point you to, one which should constitute required listening for all disciples of The Lose and budding connoisseurs of failure.
I’d been meaning to listen to the WYNC Studios production, American Fiasco, and finally got around to doing so in the past week. I cannot recommend it highly enough. American Fiasco, hosted by Roger Bennett of Men in Blazers fame, is the story of the U.S. World Cup campaign of 1998, which resulted in the U.S. finishing dead last in the tournament in France. And as bad as not qualifying in 2018 may have been, the 1998 team was, in many ways, worse. This was a team, mind you, that devolved from being Argentina 3:0 in the 1995 Copa América in Uruguay into a disjointed, disorganized side which couldn’t beat Iran at the World Cup three years later. The series features about two dozen interviews and everyone looks bad: a lot of the players come off as brats, the accidental head coach was a lightweight who was way out of his depth, the administrators come off as pompous and pigheaded and thinking the game is all about them. So, in other words, it’s all a lot like now. It’s been just long enough since that disgrace occurred that the lessons learned from it have been forgotten. Everyone in U.S. Soccer would do well to go back and learn from those mistakes, and while American Fiasco is a cautionary tale, it should also be pointed out that four years later, in 2002, the U.S. was in the quarterfinals in Korea. Things can turn around in a hurry.

• Being an American, I tend to use a lot of basketball metaphors when I’m talking about soccer. But other than the fact that in one game you score 100 and in the other you score 1, I do find a lot of similarities between them in terms of the geometry of the game, the need for spacing and the abilities to manœuver and operate in tight space. And I’m going to use another one here to make a point about the French, who remind me of one of those college basketball factories – something like Kentucky or Louisville or, even a better example from the recent past, all of the UCLA teams when Ben Howland was the coach.
The reason why I make that comparison is that the university basketball programs I just mentioned are overloaded with talent. Great talent, guys who will play in the NBA one day. But what you get, when you watch them play, is far too many basketball games where the score is something like 60-55. It’s slow, it’s boring, and wholly lacking in imagination. And needlessly so, in my opinion – all of a sudden, bang, there comes a game which is open and fast and up and down, it’s 100-98 or some such thing and all of that talent takes over, you see the skills on display and you wonder why it is that they don’t play that way all of the time. The reason the games aren’t always 100-98, of course, has to do with the fact that the head coach is paranoid. Letting talent run free means ceding control, so college basketball coaches overly emphasize defense and running sets and being ludicrously attentive to detail. Now, in a 60-55 game, better talent still usually prevails, of course, but it’s also a whole lot less enjoyable to watch.
This is France to me in a nutshell. Oh jeez, Argentina is attacking and scoring goals. Well, I guess we’d better score more. The talent on that team is absolutely ridiculous. With the attacking talent on hand, they can run any team into the ground.
But instead, what we got in France’s 1:0 win over Belgium in the semifinals was a case of cold, hard pragmatism. It had all the excitement of watching some Man United game in which Mourinho takes £250m worth of talent and uses it to park the bus. The French set out to do little more than frustrate the Belgians. That was basically the entire point of the operation. They were really struggling at first, since the Belgians were shifting shapes from defense to offense and confusing the French, but once they figured out what Belgium was up to, they adjusted the defense and turned the entire affair into a claustrophobic slog.
And fair play to them for that. The whole point is to win the damn game, and the French did so. But it certainly wasn’t fun to watch, and it wasn’t the type of game between the two teams that anyone was hoping for.
It would’ve helped if Roberto Martinez, whom I was quick to praise in my last post, hadn’t blindly continued to ride a hot hand. His insertion of Fellaini and Chadli into the Japan game as substitutes had saved them. He left both in the starting lineup against Brazil, and Fellaini had a terrific game. But neither was of any use against a French team intent upon gumming up the works. Fellaini got beat for the goal on a set piece, and if he’s not any good in the air, then what good is he on the pitch? Chadli, meanwhile, was so poor on the right flank that the French just left him alone after a while, sloping their defense the other way to deal with Hazard on the left. It was such a bog in the middle of the pitch for the Belgians, with Witsel and Dembele and Fellaini all getting in each other’s way, that finally they stuck Fellaini on the left wing, which is an even more useless place for him. Martinez got it all right against Brazil, but got it all wrong in this game. Belgium could have played for six hours and they weren’t going to score.
I do think the Belgians go home with more regrets than the English. England’s case for being good enough to win this tournament stemmed from the how the draw and the bracket shook out – get yourself into a 1-game, winner-take-all situation, and there’s no reason to think you couldn’t win. But on talent, the Belgians were good enough to win this tournament, they were good enough to beat literally any and everyone and they failed to do so. They could have, and maybe even should have won this tournament – which is the kind of thing that you can’t say very often. And it’s a big ask to expect this group to come back four years from now, which would be the third World Cup. You saw just how old and slow the 3-timers from Germany and Spain looked in this event. These guys play so many games every year and eventually it takes its toll. There are some good young players in the pipeline in Belgium, to be sure, but how good is a question. They have élite talent right now, they have game changers like Hazard and De Bruyne who can turn a game on a dime. You just don’t know where and when you’re going to have even one of those types of players, let alone more than one. I can see them giving it a go two years from now in the Euros, however. Winning that tournament should be the goal – the main problem being, of course, that the French are likely going to be in their way.
And in general, I’m down with the French, I’m cool with the French and I still have a ticket here for France at 11/2 which, I suspect, is going to pay off tomorrow. (Though I would have liked my Belgium at 9/1 paying off even more.) But I find pragmatic soccer to be incredibly tiresome, and I didn’t much care for seeing Deschamps’ risk-averse, conservative tactics wind up being rewarded. I understand pragmatic soccer when you don’t have any good players. Then it makes a lot of sense. But seeing the French do this just seems like a waste of talent.

I’m hoping that the game tomorrow is a little more open and expansive. It’s probably not going to be a very good game, because World Cup finals rarely are. I’ve been watching the World Cup for 36 years now, and the only final that I would say was actually good was Argentina 3:2 West Germany in 1986. My hope is that Croatia will have all of their moxie and street smarts on display. I think they’ll get beat, and it may not ultimately be that close, but I hope instead that they fight like hell and we get a really exciting game, one worthy of capping off a really exciting tournament. That, and I want to see me some checkers. Let’s get the red and white checkerboard design out tomorrow, which is one of the coolest looks in sports. They may go down to defeat, but I want the Croatians to look good while doing so.

Down to Four

Pow!

WELCOME to the semifinals that we all would have liked to see at the Euros two years ago, instead of the dross match-ups we wound up getting. On balance, I would say that the four best teams in the tournament have managed to reach the semifinals. Neither Belgium nor Croatia has lost a game, while the only blemishes on the records of France and England have come in games that didn’t really matter. Oftentimes, this isn’t the case, of course. Instead, you’ll often have some team reach this point in the competition who were sort of feeling their along in the dark before finally getting it together, or perhaps you’ll have a team that rides their luck and doesn’t necessarily seem like they deserve to be there. This is not the case this year. We have four really good teams capable of playing really exciting, attacking football. I’m hoping these four sides will throw caution to the wind in the next couple of days and really try to play their preferred styles and to their strengths.

• It could be argued, I suppose, that Croatia has ridden their luck a little bit in the past two games, though in general, I don’t have too many regrets when I feel like the team which is actually the better team winds up advancing on penalties. The reason I say that is not to discredit those who lost that one particular game on penalties – an act which ultimately feels a bit random. But the better team advancing makes for the prospect of the next game to be a better game. I’d rather watch the Croatians come out and try to take the game to England in the semifinals than watch the Russians set 10 or 11 behind the ball.
Though to give them proper due here, Russia were terrific at the end of their match with Croatia in the Quarters. Russia fell behind in extra time by soccer’s equivalent of a ground ball with eyes, a strange ball that found the net and just sort of eluded everyone off the head of Vida (who was once fined £80,000 for drinking beer on the team bus, which should make him a hero to us all). Extra time generally sucks, of course, and for obvious reasons: both teams are absolutely paranoid of making a mistake, so neither team is willing to risk. It’s such a waste of time that some competitions have done away with it entirely, preferring to go straight to penalties – which I happen not to like, since I’d rather see stoppage time turn into a mad dash rather than a slow, cautious slog. But extra time is pretty much useless – unless, of course, someone scores, which Croatia did, and to which the Russians responded by throwing everyone forward in a mad scramble to equalize. And they did so, eventually and deservedly, on a set piece with the Brazilian-turned-Russian Fernandes heading home against an exhausted Croatian defense. The Croatians were sort of fighting on two fronts in this game, battling fatigue and also trying to avoid running afoul of the dumbest rule of the World Cup, since pretty much everyone on the team was on a yellow card and a second would see them suspended for the semi final they’d not even qualified for yet. I hate that rule. It’s a dumb rule.
But the Russians equalized, and they deserved it, and we’ve probably not given them quite enough credit for their performance in this tournament. They maxed their talents and went a whole helluva lot further in this tourney than I certainly thought they would. Their fans were terrific and it was an impressive performance to reach the quarters.
But jesus christ, those penalties. My god. This might be the worst penalty I’ve ever seen:

What the hell was that? Subašić had time to drive, lay down, have a drink, have a sandwich, and then casually paw away a shot which was right at him. It was the easiest block I’ve seen since Steven Adams:

Seriously, what the actual fuck? I could understand Fernandes’ miss later on for the Russians – it had the hallmark of a guy seeing the goalkeeper moving and hastily trying to change his mind – but that first miss was just incomprehensible.
So Croatia advance and I don’t really read that much into the fact that they’ve had to go to penalties twice in a row in the knockouts. It’s really hard sometimes to break down a well organized defense. You can do it right and the ball still won’t go in the damn goal. My hunch is that, after facing two stifling and claustrophobic opponents, the Croatians are looking forward to playing an England side that will – gasp! – actually want to play a little bit. They might actually be able to have some fun.
And this is a strange place for Croatia to be, as stories such as this and this have pointed out. The FA is a mess, the game is under scrutiny in Croatia, and viewed by the public with mistrust and derision. Apparently, there has been a subset of fans over the years who’ve gone to these extreme lengths of bad behavior at matches in order to try and embarrass the FA as much as possible. Thus is the extent to which people are fed up with the corruption and the graft – and not even World Cup success can sweep it under the rug, not when some of the best players in the country are caught up in the mess. With its mass appeal, sport always makes for a natural symbol, and often becomes adopted by the worst sorts of scoundrels. Over time, those symbols become less clear-cut and less well-defined. Overall, my friends of Croatian descent are happy to see their team in the semifinals of the World Cup, but there is still deep skepticism, and deservedly so, and winning two more games isn’t going to paper over all of the cracks.

• My English friends, meanwhile, seem to have abandoned all of their usual skepticism and gone for full on, nutters embracing of “it’s coming home.” The scenes from London and elsewhere of people jumping all over each other and throwing beer on each other and losing their minds is, well, it’s long overdue is what it is.
And maybe I’m wrong here, but I was living in England back in 1990 – the last time The Three Lions reached the semifinal – and I just don’t recall there being so much genuine joy at reaching this stage of the tournament. Perhaps it’s simply a case of absence making the heart grow fonder. There was, I think, a much higher level of expectation back then, and with good reason – England had an outstanding side that year, had been consistently good throughout the 1980s, and reaching the semis was no great shock. The last 28 years for England have run the gamut from being underachieving to overly optimistic, with repeated golden generations proving to be fool’s gold, and with healthy doses of penalty shootout heartbreak and wanton self-destruction added to the mix. People want something to believe in after all that time.
And it’s cool for England and their fans. They’re a really good team, and a fun team, and their 2:0 victory over the Swedes was notable for how decidedly comfortable it was. England had the better team, they knew it from the start and they played like it from the get-go. It helped that Sweden didn’t play very well, although they did force some nice saves from Pickford while still trailing by only a goal. (Pickford being one of the three favorites, along with Subašić and Belgium’s Courtois, to win the Golden Gloves.) But England seemed to know what to do against them all along, with the ball moving well and Sterling running in between the lines and opening up the spaces for everyone else. A Sweden equalizer would have only delayed the inevitable demise.
You can only play who is before you, of course, and England have found themselves being the beneficiary of some astonishingly good fortune in that regard. Their road to the semis includes Tunisia, Panama, the Belgian B team who beat their B team, Colombia without James, and a Sweden side who’d clearly reached their outer limits. This leads me to wonder if everything really is so rosy for the English. They’ve had to be patient, of course, since so many of their opponents have sat deep and let them have the ball, but it is hard to tell just how good they really are. I’m curious as to how they’ll respond to an opponent who dares to attack them.
But England and its fans have earned the right to dream big, because as much as the fans are inclined to get ahead of themselves, the team continues to deliver. I’m worried however, about England winning a World Cup. Were that to happen, who would I take the piss out of?

• Uruguay were a center forward short against France. They were always going to be up against it without Cavani up front, he being the type of player who can make up for a lot of your deficiencies. With their attack limited – the attack consisting basically of Suárez and some dude I’ve never heard of – Uruguay really had to be flawless against the French defensively, and not make any mistakes, to have a chance to win. And even then, maybe not so much, as I wouldn’t even call the first goal – a skimming Raphaël Varane header off a free kick – a mistake. It was just a really nice play from the French, who are entirely capable of making lots of really nice plays over the course of a game. But once that happened, and once Lloris parried away a header and Godin flubbed a chance to level, it never seemed like Uruguay was going to get back in the game.
With the second French goal, of course, being a horrible mistake:

Sigh

Muslera’s always been something of a flaky and eccentric goalkeeper. He does have a mistake in him. That said, he’s been a rock for La Celeste over the years, his shot-stopping having quite a bit to do with them finishing fourth in South Africa back in 2010. It was an awful mistake, and as a lifetime member of the goalkeepers union, this one absolutely made me cringe. One of my wacky punster friends, who is also a grumpy Liverpool fan, said that Muslera got caught up in the heat of the moment and got kariused away.

No, I didn’t think it was any good either.
But as I’ve said, oftentimes the hardest shots to judge are the ones right at you, and there is just enough english and swerve on Griezmann’s shot to mess him up. Whatever faint hopes Uruguay still held out were pretty much extinguished by Muslera’s gaffe. You could tell that their heart wasn’t in it any longer.
And the French now find themselves in something of a strange position, in that of the four teams remaining in this tournament, they’re probably the most conservative tactically as well as the most defensively-oriented. And this creates some interesting sorts of dilemmas for their next opponent(s). First of all, you don’t want to run with France. Don’t run with France. Bad, bad, bad. The best way teams come up with to deal with France is to just give them the ball and stack the lines and let Les Bleus try to figure out what to do. But none of the remaining teams in this tournament want to do that. All of them want to be on the front foot and going forward. We saw the Belgians trying to park the bus the other day against Brazil in the second half. It didn’t go very well. They were all out of sync and got outshot 17-1 in the second half. So you’re probably better off, if you’re the Belgians, just playing your game and hoping for the best. Which we’d all be better for, to be honest, because if there is one team on the planet who can run with the French and live to tell about it, it’s probably the Belgians.

• I wasn’t at all surprised that the Belgians beat Brazil. This is because I thought, going into this match, that the Belgians had the better team. People in the media were saying, “the Brazilians have all of these great players,” to which my response was, “well, yeah, and so do the Belgians.” “Oh, but look at all of that attacking talent in yellow shirts.” “The red shirts have Hazard, De Bruyne, and Lukaku up front. Do you really want a piece of that?”
When you look at their line-up, 1 through 11, the Belgians have as much talent as any team in the world. Brazil, France, you name it. They can go player for player with all of them. Which is weird to say, and which is hard to believe, but these aren’t the Belgians of yore. For years the Belgians were this plodding and overly defensive side which succeeded through lulling their opponents into a stupor, a dismal mix of numbness and frustration.
Talent hasn’t been an issue for several years now. The Belgians have had tonnes of good players, but none of them ever seemed to know where they were supposed to be on the pitch. After their rather embarrassing exit from the Euros, where the Welsh ran circles around them in the quarterfinals, they finally put us all out of our misery by getting rid of tactical lightweight Marc Wilmots, whose tenure at the helm of the Belgians was tantamount to coaching malpractice. But the hiring of Roberto Martinez was a surprise, to say the least. I’ve always enjoyed him as an analyst and a commentator, and he did a nice job taking lesser sides in England and making them into winners, but he’d just been fired at Everton and his teams have always had an approach to defending resembling that of a toreador. To be honest, the hiring didn’t make much sense.
And, apparently, the joke was on all of us. Not only has Martinez infused his usual positivity into this Belgian side, and employed the aggressive attacking tactics which best suit the talent at his disposal, but he’s also shown that he has some serious chops. All of us who doubted his coaching ability over the years may have to begrudgingly give the man his due.
It was an fun little tactical wrinkle Martinez threw out there against Brazil, playing De Bruyne at false nine and slipping Lukaku over into the space on the right – the space Marcelo, Brazil’s swashbuckling left back, frequently vacates as he ventures forward. And at first, Brazil had to be a bit more cautious on the attack, wary of this threat. Everyone tries to figure out how to take advantage of that empty Marcelo space, be it playing against Brazil or against Real Madrid, and it usually doesn’t work because there aren’t guys around to fully take advantage, but Lukaku is one of the most devastating transition players in the world and he created the second Belgian goal all by himself by rampaging at the Brazilian defense. That goal was another devastating counter from a corner in which Lukaku, playing on the right, went scorched earth on poor Fernandinho and then set up De Bruyne, who unleashed a cannonball into the bottom corner.
Poor Fernandinho. The guy played maybe the single worst game of midfield ever four years ago against the Germans, and here he is, four years later, forced into the lineup to replace the suspended Casemiro, and first he bats a Kompany header into the net for an own goal, and then he winds up BBQ chicken against Lukaku. The guy’s a good player, but the World Cup’s never been kind to him.
And the Brazilians ultimately couldn’t find the second goal – thanks in part to Courtois, who is monstrous and reminded everyone that oh, yeah, the Belgians also have a great goalkeeper to go with their ridiculous Hazard-De Bruyne-Lukaku front three and deep midfield and solid back three. The Brazilians’ fortunes picked up after making a trio of substitutions: Firmino and Douglas Costa and Renato Augusto, terrific players all of them and all of whom, arguably, should have been playing more. But it’s hard to mess with success, and Brazil has been rolling the past couple of years, so you certainly cannot blame them for wanting to roll with the guys who got them that far. But even though they were winning, I kept wanting more from them in this tournament. I wanted better finishing and more incisive play. Neymar didn’t play well and I doubt he was fully fit, Gabriel Jesus didn’t play well. The offense failed to click and the defense, meanwhile, was stingy about conceding goals but seemed periodically shaky while doing so. They could get by for a while, but they finally ran into a team who had no fear of them and who could match their talent on the pitch.
Which, again, is shocking to say. The Belgians? The Belgians?
And Belgium’s rise to this place is instructive when considering the plight of poor old USA FC. It’s a small country, of course, so it’s easier to implement the sorts of structural changes necessary to overhaul a system, but in the middle of the past decade, after sinking into dire levels of malaise, the Belgians basically blew everything up. They changed the idea of how they wanted players to play, they changed the way they coached, they changed the way they administrated the game at every level. A decade later, and the national team is two games away from winning a World Cup. But it’s the first part of that statement – “a decade later” – that’s important.  It took the Germans more than a decade for “das reboot” to result in winning a World Cup. This stuff takes time, it requires patience and a commitment to a process which, at times, may not seem like it’s going to pay off. And at the national level, that also means you have to have to have modest expectations, at first. You have to play the kids, you have to let them screw up and make all of the right kinds of mistakes, and hope that, eventually, they won’t be making those mistakes any more.
Now, not even the most optimistic Belgian would have thought, a dozen years ago, that 12 years hence they’d be playing in the semifinals of a World Cup. But in order to one day exceed your wildest expectations, you have to first be realistic about the point where you’re at – which, in the case of the Belgians, was nowhere. But the Belgians are proof that it can, in fact, be done. It’s only when you first meet your realistic expectations that it’s possible to eventually exceed them.

And Then There Were Eight

LET the record show that the right side of the bracket is, in fact, six kinds of crap. In the Round of 16, the left side of the bracket gave us four games in which all eight teams played well and the games ran the gamut from good to ‘OMFG!’ Over on the right side, however, basically all eight teams were varying degrees of rubbish and the games ranged from dreadful to a good cure for insomnia.

And it was destined to be that way from the outset, of course, given the draw. Soccer loves it’s draws, after all, both on and off the field. The entire narrative of the tourney winds up being based upon the random bouncing of ping pong balls – an act which, for some reason, we’re approving of. I personally think lotteries are nonsense. It’s part of why I cannot take the Champions League as serious as others. There have been countless examples of teams advancing deep into that tournament while not being particularly good, simply by drawing teams who happen to be worse.

One of the main reasons that the right side of the draw sucks is that all four of the top seeds who were expected to be occupying top line places on the right side – Spain, Argentina, Germany, Poland – were varying degrees of contemptible in this tournament. Two of those teams’ shortcomings were predictable. In hindsight, perhaps all four should have been. But this sort of thing happens pretty much every tournament, although maybe not to this sort of extreme. You wind up with this knockout match-ups where you think, “huh?” There is no sort of draw or set-up which is ultimately going to result in eight match-ups which are all great. There will be one-off upsets, overachievers going about overachieving, lackluster performances, teams out of form and whatnot. There are always going to be some games which are duds, and there isn’t any way to prevent that. Everyone on the right side of that draw played themselves into a position to then play terrible Round of 16 games.

It just sort of sucked that there were so many lousy games on one side of the bracket. And even though the two games on Monday – Brazil’s 2:0 win over Mexico and Belgium’s 3:2 win over Japan – were both good matches (and, in the case of the latter, one of the most exciting World Cup games we’ve seen in years), what I think was bothersome to me, over the course of Monday and Tuesday’s four Round of 16 matches, was the fact that so many of the worst traits of the sport wound up being on display. Now, the Belgium-Japan game was so good that the unpleasant tastes in the mouth from the other games gets blunted a bit, but that taste still hasn’t quite gone away.

• For starters, I’m sick and tired of Neymar’s antics. He’s a wonderful player, arguably among the most gifted in the sport, but I’m not interested in watching him show off, nor am I interested in watching him roll around on the floor acting like he’s been shot.
And I’m saying this as someone who is willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Neymar’s on the floor a lot because he gets fouled a lot, and that fact is also annoying. I want to see great players make plays. I don’t want to see great players constantly getting cut down.
And I also understand the point of embellishing plays. You’re trying to gain a competitive advantage, and one of the ways in which you do that in soccer is to fool the referee into making decisions he shouldn’t. This happens in pretty much every sport. It’s hard for me, as an NBA fan, to bitch about guys diving in soccer when I put up with watching 82 games of James Harden flopping like a fish and flailing about. The upside of the dive and the embellishment comes if you convince a referee to award a penalty, or a free kick, or a card to an opponent. You’ve earned an advantage. You’re trying to win the game and there is little downside to trying it. Oh, occasionally, they’ll give you a yellow card for ‘simulation,’ but that’s always been a spotty call at best.
Quite honestly, Neymar probably should have gotten a yellow card for his bad acting vs. the Mexicans on Monday – a card which would have seem him suspended for tomorrow’s Quarterfinal against the Belgians. The Mexicans had already come out and said that Neymar’s a diver in the press before the game, and him flopping and floundering about just further annoyed them, but in that sense, Neymar had won, because he’s got them all mad at him and, it could be argued, further off their game.
But it is unsightly, and it gets tiresome, and about the most memorable thing from the first four Brazil matches in this tournament are Neymar’s theatrics. Those stand out far more than any of Coutinho’s goals or Willian’s savvy forward play. That’s not what people want to see.
Neymar wound up scoring the first in Brazil’s 2:0 win, a game in which El Tri’s approach was the right one – push the pace early, be aggressive in the press, take the game to the Brazilian defense and try to get an early goal, after which they could then settle into more of the defensive, counterattacking side that was so effective against the Germans. Mexico were the better team in the first 25 minutes, but the goal didn’t come. And such a high-energy strategy was bound to have a shorter half life than the norm in the 95° heat. Mexico wilted and labored through the second half of the match.
This makes seven consecutive World Cups where El Tri have been ousted in the Round of 16 – a sign of a pretty consistently high standard of play over that time, but also a source of understandable frustration. By El Tri standards, this Round of 16 exit was fairly pedestrian. Be it through wonder goals, iffy penalties, or humbling and inglorious defeats to hated rivals, Mexico usually find a way to make their exit memorable.
And I would imagine this is the end for head coach Juan-Carlos Osorio whom, in truth, was probably never going to be able to get out of the shadow of that horrible pantsing at the hands of the Chileans, a touchdown-sized defeat in 2016’s Copa América Centenario. Even though Mexico have been, in my mind, quite good ever since, I don’t think it could ever be good enough. Were he to walk away from El Tri and find himself at the helm of USA FC, I for one wouldn’t mind. He did a pretty good job, on balance, for Mexico, his history in the sport is rooted in America, and I don’t really mind that he’s something of a tinkerer, because god knows we have plenty of time here to try and figure out what our best XI is and how we want USA FC to play.

• Sweden are this year’s “what are they doing in the Quarters?” team after their 1:0 win over Switzerland – who would be the “what are they doing in the Quarters?” team if the result had been reversed.
Both of these teams seemed to regard the ball as if it’s some sort of rapid possum that you don’t want to get near. Both are well-organized sides which can be offensively challenged. It was appropriate that the margin of victory came from a fairly innocuous shot which deflected in, given that neither team seemed capable of actually putting a shot on target. The finishing from both sides was dreadful.
It was ultimately the Swiss who took possession of the rabid possum for longer periods of time, and the Swiss actually have a number of excellent passers on their team in the likes of Shaqiri and Xhaka and Rodriguez, but it doesn’t do much good to have great passers if you don’t have anyone to pass it to. There are 8.4 million people in Switzerland and you’d think that you could find one who could play center forward. I feel like the Swiss have been looking for a striker for about 10 years now.
I think a lot of us were thinking before hand that this game was going to be a dog, and it lived up to that billing. That said, we have to give the Swedes some credit here. I suppose the Zlatan-free Swedes are less exciting, but Zlatan was leading the line for them two years ago in France when they seemed, to my eye, to be about the worst team in the Euros. It’s easy to say they have punched above their weight all of this time, but the fact is that they knocked out the Dutch in qualifying, they knocked out the Italians in the playoffs, they really should have killed off the Germans, and they beat the tar out of Mexico, so it’s not that much of an upset that they’ve reached the Quarterfinals. There is almost always one of these teams who advances this far in the event, a team that’s pragmatic and dependent upon cohesiveness and being stout defensively for their success. It makes them a tough out, and even if it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing of styles, the success is undeniable.

• Tuesday night would have been a great night for some football if the Colombians had actually wanted to play some. Without James in the line-up, they played as if they didn’t think they could actually win the game. Instead, their strategy seemed to be to play nine behind the ball, act all macho and try to be intimidating, kick the English repeatedly, whine at the referee about everything, and generally act like shitweasels.
Shitweaselry is a two-way street, of course, and the English were dumb enough to flop and flail and overly embellish and engage in similar sorts of behaviours in response, which made it one helluva match for American referee Mark Geiger to try and sort out.
And trust me, I’m no Geiger fan by any means, but I’m always amused when you hear people whine and bitch after the fact, like the Colombians did, because they make it a point to say they lost because of “the American referee.” It’s important to get that “American” bit in there as a point of emphasis. This is the same sort of bullshit which came from some Brazilians in 1998 when “the idiot American referee” (their words, not mine) gave a penalty to Norway in stoppage time which gave the Norwegians a 2:1 win over Brazil. (Never mind the fact that, you know, he got the call right.) Guess what? There are plenty of shitty officials in South America as well, with the Ecuadorian who presided over this fiasco being the worst of all time. There are shitty officials all over the world. If anything, the Colombians should have been thankful Geiger didn’t send any of them off for their perpetual acts of petulance.
So this game was absolute garbage to watch, since the Colombians didn’t really seem to want to actually play any football while the English attempted to do so and failed at it. It was about the 70’ mark that the Colombians decided, down a goal and verging on going home, that maybe they should actually start playing a little bit and, lo and behold, they were actually pretty good at it. They proceeded to boss the game for the next 20 minutes, deservedly equalizing in stoppage time, and then looked like they’d get a winner in the first period of extra time against an England side which seemed shellshocked at having blown a 1-goal lead.
And I was annoyed with Colombians in this game because I wanted to see them play the expansive, geometric, swift style which has always served them well. I really didn’t have any sort of rooting interest, although I sort of figured that, given all of the bluster and bombast and ludicrous overconfidence spewing forth out of the U.K. about how the stars had aligned for England to have an easy path to the final, the English would then find a way to blow it. And, of course, after conceding at 90+3’ on a corner, and limping their way shakily through the first bit of extra time, the national nightmare that is England going to penalties reared its ugly head once more.
But maybe this is the new England after all, the side that doesn’t give any points to minnows like Tunisia and the side that has figured out that you don’t have to take a penalty kick with both of your hands around your own throat. Of course, now that England have slain the penalty shootout daemon, they just might have to invent a new way to screw up in their Quarterfinal with the Swedes. And I kid my English friends about their fandom, which is a comical combination of grotesque bombast with a healthy dose of nihilism. They all think England is going to win the World Cup while simultaneously believing they’ll also lose it in the most stupid of ways imaginable.

I could watch this 1000 times

• And I’ve saved the best for last here, and Belgium v. Japan was great. It was a great game. The second half of this match was probably the best 45 minutes of play I’ve seen in a World Cup in 20 years. The winning goal, where Belgium go about 90 yards in 10 seconds on the counter, is as stunning a team goal as you’re likely to ever see, a mix of speed, savvy, awareness, and just out-and-out hustle.
It’s easy when you look at the pedigree of the two teams in this game to immediately think, “what’s wrong with the Belgians?” But maybe it’s a case where Japan was, in fact, marvelous in this game. The full quote from Sartre adorning the top of this page reads, “in football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team.” We tend to forget, at times, that the opponent is, in fact, trying just as hard as you are. They have guys who can play, and guys who make plays. It’s not necessarily a condemnation of the winners that they almost lost. Sometimes, the losers play really well.
And Japan were terrific in this game. They played wonderful, courageous soccer. They didn’t just sit back after they jumped to a 2-goal lead because they knew very well their own shortcomings. Belgium changed the game when they inserted Chadli and Fellaini in the game, the former of whom found all kinds of space on the wing and started raising havoc while the latter took up his usual role as the most dominant aerial presence in the game. Once Belgium got it back to 2-2, a third Belgian goal began to feel inevitable – so Japan chose to attack, pushing he Belgians back and forcing several good saves out of Courtois, including one which led to the fateful corner.
And if you’re Japan here, what do you do on that corner? Do you play it safe and go into extra time, or do you hope to sneak a winner from the set piece? Hell, the Belgians still have more subs on the bench to throw at your tiring defense, they are going to spend the next 30 minutes launching balls into the box, and you can’t stop either or Fellaini or Lukaku in the air. (Even though he missed a tonne of chances, eventually, Lukaku’s going to make one of them if you keep letting him have them.) Maybe you can sneak a goal on a counter, or hold on for a half-hour and go to penalties, but you could also see the Belgians scoring two or even three in extra time. A 4:2 or even 5:2 final score seemed more likely, in fact, given how the game was going.
So Japan played to win, which I would have done as well. But the problem was the corner was straight to Courtois, at which point the Japanese had a problem:

There are six Blue Samurai behind the ball.
De Bruyne started this play on the endline, playing first man on the defense, while Meunier was marking the short corner. As soon as Courtois catches, they’re headed the other way along with Chadli, who was marking the outside man and who turns and sprints 85 yards. Also, interestingly enough, Lukaku was positioned at the half line for this break. Normally, you’d drop your big center forward into the penalty area to defend the corner. Lukaku does that very thing all the time. But he didn’t have to, in this case, because they have Fellaini in the game, and so Belgium chose to set him up high just in case the break was on.
My god, was the break ever on. It’s more like a jail break. It’s 5-on-4 and De Bruyne has 50 yards of open space in front of him. This was not going to end well for Japan:

We dare you to find a better counterattack!

Chadli finishes off a beautiful team play to give Belgium the win late in stoppage time. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/lbUxZDzG0E

— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) July 2, 2018

Lukaku’s movement and smarts on that play are incredible. He makes the whole play happen without ever touching the ball, first by running at the last defender and opening up space for the pass to Meunier on the right, and then dragging that last defender inside to set up the dummy for his teammate, Chadli, to finish the job.
That’s one of the most beautiful plays I’ve ever seen. If you’re going to get beat in the World Cup, get beat by something like that. Japan were a total mess of a side coming into this tournament, and had inched their way into the Round of 16 mostly through the foibles of others in Group H, but they made a lot of friends in this defeat.
This game had everything going for it. Great goals, a stunning comeback, a gonzo finish. It was fast, it was competitive, and yet it was also classy, a game absent a lot of the politicking with officials and sprawling all over the pitch. It all combined to make for a truly beautiful game of the beautiful game.

And then there were eight. This tournament continues to be compelling even when it slips off the rails and you have to sit through a bad game culminating in a penalty shootout – a lousy way to end a game, but nonetheless spectacular when it comes to tension and drama. The best World Cup I can recall watching, in terms of drama and storylines, was France 1998, but this one is right up there. Russia 2018 continues to delight.

The Ending of Eras

A work of goddamn art

THERE are no sacred cows here at In Play Lose. Losing is losing. If you suck, and you wind up going home, tough shit. Now, in the case of soccer, as opposed to other sports, losing can feel considerably more unjust. This has to do with the mechanics of the game. Rarely, in any other sport, can you say with much conviction that the better team lost. In soccer, however, that seems to happen all the time. One team has the better of the play and yet the damn ball won’t go in the goal and the other team takes advantage of a single good opportunity and wins 1:0 and it all feels like an unjust result. Or, even worse, you wind up tied and the game drags through 30 minutes of extra time and then it goes to penalties and the team which seemed to have been the worse wins the lottery. That’s how this game goes. If you want life to be fair, don’t play soccer or, even perhaps even more importantly, don’t watch soccer because, at times, it will drive you mad as hatters.

But while these types of games are frequent, the fact is that, far more often than not, the better team does, in fact, win and, more to the point, teams that lose find their way to put themselves in position to lose – they miss chances, they make mistakes and whatnot. And the margins are so damn minute that, over time, we tend to forget just how many times it is that those we deem “great” were, in fact, on the verge of failure. A large part of being “better” simply comes down to figuring out how, on a moment to moment basis, not to mess it all up. For every dominating 4:0 win which sticks in the memory, there are countless more 1:0 and 2:1 results which we eventually come to overlook.

And this complicates legacies – not only are long track records of success often dotted with near-misses and great escapes, but the reverse is also true. There are great players and great teams who, ultimately, never win anything. We wind up disparaging them for failure, even if those margins are razor thin and the results would’ve, could’ve, or even should’ve been different. And I’m mentioning this in the context of writing about the World Cup because what we’ve been watching in Russia is the end of an era for a generation of great players and the teams that they’ve played on. With each successive flameout of one of élite talents or teams, the immediate impulse is to look back on what they either have or have not wound up accomplishing at this level and on this stage, but what seems apparent to me is that the primary reason for this one last World Cup failure seems to be a propensity to dabble in the nostalgia of the past – that is to say, the belief that what you did which worked before is somehow going to magically work again X number of years later.

It’s perfectly reasonable and understandable, of course. You trust those who have done it before to be able to do it again, you go back to a tried-and-true tactic or style of play. But the game keeps changing and evolving over time, and you have to adapt and adjust. Two of the most influential nations in the game of soccer – the Netherlands and Italy – didn’t even make it to the World Cup this year, both of whom have understandably been in love with their ideas over the years. But everyone plays Dutch possession soccer now, everyone plays an Italian back three with wingbacks bombing forward. You have to shift shapes. What works one day won’t work for all of the days.

• Highlights from today’s Spain-Russia game:



With every passing game of this World Cup, I found myself liking this Spain team less and less. I picked them to win this World Cup at the start, and stuck with that prediction even after they stupidly fired their head coach. I believed that firing wouldn’t ultimately make much of a difference, and in the end, I don’t think that it did – because they weren’t that good to begin with, and it should have been obvious all along.
Spain rose to prominence playing tiki-taka, a short passing possession game based on the principles of Johan Cruijff’s Total Football from the 1970s. The overview which best describes the basis of Total Football was that any player on the field could take up any position on the field in an instant, and that movement, and the uncertainty it created, perpetually kept the opposition off-balance. The genius of tiki-taka stemmed from the idea that you could play defense with offense. You could simply suffocate the opposition, who just couldn’t get the ball back enough. Spain would score a goal and the game would be as good as over. But again, the key to the whole thing was movement, some of it unorthodox movements, be it a fullback barreling down the flank, or a center forward springing forth 30 yards to show for a pass. The ball, and the players, were constantly in motion, changing the point of attack, changing the passing angles. Trying to play Spain was a continuous act of attempting to hit a moving target.
But if guys don’t move, the whole thing doesn’t work, and Spain doesn’t move any more. I’ve enjoyed Spain a lot in the past decade, but watching them today was downright painful. Oh, sure, they had plenty of possession, but all of it was empty calories.
Spain completed 1,029 passes during the course of 120 minutes in their Round of 16 match against Russia, and probably 1,000 of them were pointless. Isco alone completed 132 passes in this match, and 12 of them went forward. When Russia scored on a penalty at 41’ to even the game at 1-1, it was Russia’s first shot on target – and, up to that point, Spain hadn’t had a shot on target, either. The Russians wound up defending for almost the entire game but rarely, if ever, looked uncomfortable doing so.
Seriously, what was the bloody point of that? Side-to-side, backwards, side-to-side again, backwards again. It was all ponderous and labored, absent of ideas and easy to defend. And so many of the culprits in Spain’s demise were the old guard, old standbys who’ve been playing for 8-10 years now. They all seemed out of ideas, simply reverting to patterns which have been drilled into their heads over a course of a decade which, clearly, no longer work. There is no tactical advantage that can ever truly trump being old and slow.
And that old way of playing doesn’t jibe with either their youngsters on the wings, who want to be a bit more direct, nor with Diego Costa at center forward, who may be something of a shithouse but who is also a helluva player, albeit a different type of forward than Spain are used to in terms of movement style. This is what happens in the international game. You don’t always have the ideal pieces at your disposal. I can’t even remember, among the 1,029 passes of this Russia game, a single one of them that was direct and decisive within Costa’s general area.
And what was interesting to me was that the one good chance Spain had in extra time came on, of all things, a counter attack. The Russians didn’t want the ball at all in this game, because having the ball meant having a chance to mess things up. Sure enough, they went forward and they mess things up, Spain springs a counter, the ball is played to Rodrigo on the right and he makes BBQ chicken of a defender and whoosh! there he goes, at speed, barreling down the wing and forcing a save from the Russian keeper – the only time in the whole game he seemed stressed. Sometimes, the best way to stretch a tight defense is to actually give them the ball and coax them to come forward. It’s something of a counterintuitive tactic, but then again, if nothing you’re doing is working, you may as well try something different.
But Spain weren’t that willing to do that, in part, because giving the other team the ball feels like a bad idea when your defense sucks. Playing defense with the offense doesn’t work if the offense doesn’t move. Any time you lose the ball, your back line looks like a target. And their cast of 30-somethings in the back all showed their age in this tournament. They struggled with Morocco, looked spooked any time Ronaldo ran at them, and even struggled with Iran.
Spain are not any good at the moment. They weren’t any good at the Euros, they weren’t any good in Brazil in 2014. There are so many good players coming out of Spain now that you look to this slow, aging team and wonder why anyone thought this was the best side they could put out, but at the same time, the young players didn’t play worth a damn, either. They didn’t deserve to win this match. They deserve no more nice things.

Defense for display purposes only

• When I saw Argentina set up against France with Messi playing as a false nine, my thought was, “huh?” The only logic that I could see to doing this was that by theoretically putting Messi in a more advanced position, rather than playing behind a center forward, it would work to get him onto the central defenders and away from Kante, who happens to be the best defensive midfielder in the world and who would probably shadow Messi the entire game and make his life completely miserable. But one of the problems with this was that Messi wasn’t going to spend the entire game in an advanced position. He was going to go anywhere he needed to go to get the ball, and with no one up front, the central defense of France would not be threatened. But the other problem, which seemed completely obvious to me, was that by not having a center forward as an outlet, as a guy who could hold up play and try to control some pace, the only outlets for pressure would involve playing the ball down the wings, which would naturally lead to stretching the field.
And stretching the field is the single worst thing you can do against the French. Seriously, don’t try to run with France. It’s a terrible idea. France want to play basketball on grass. They want to get the ball and run, they want Pogba on the ball at speed and in space leading the break, they want their forwards running off of Giroud, who is a great passer out of the post. They’re too fast, too big, and too skilled. One of the reasons it’s so hard for France to score a lot of the time is that their opponents are legitimately terrified of getting run out of the building and huddle up in their own end.
Argentina gets points for bravery, I suppose. The folly of trying to beat France at France’s game was evident right away, as Mbappe ran 70 yards with the ball and beat four defenders and got hauled down for a penalty. To Argentina’s credit, Messi cooked up three goals fir his teammates in this game – and it didn’t matter. You could have said to me France would score any number between 4-8 in this game and I’d have believed you. At no point did it ever seem like Argentina was winning this game, not even when they found themselves inexplicably ahead four minutes into the second half, at which point France simply amped up the tempo and the pressure and produced three goals in 25 minutes – the third of which being absolutely ridiculous, a 4-pass sequence covering 90 yards straight down the middle of the park during which no Argentine was ever within 10 yards of being able to make a play. Argentina’s defense has been a mess the entire tournament, but deciding to make it even less compact while getting into a track meet with the fastest team in the world seemed like suicide.
Argentina’s entire World Cup campaign was destined to fail from the outset, and this eccentric tactical approach of not playing a center forward, when your team has nothing but good forwards on its roster, is the final act of malpractice. Messi doesn’t have enough fingers to stick into all of the leaks springing from this dam. His brilliance has permitted his nation to go on living in denial about the horrible state of the domestic game for years now. (This piece from The Independent out of the U.K. is even more damning.) Given all of the madness going on behind the scenes in the camp – there have been stories of witch doctors, of the president of the country calling out of concern, of an on-going mutiny against the coach, of the players coaching themselves and picking out their own line-ups – and the lack of admiration and adoration he gets back home, you wonder why Messi would want to bother, and I suspect that he won’t. And if he’s done wearing the light blue stripes, his Argentina career is a most complicated of legacies. Argentina reached the finals of the last three major tournaments in which they played, after all, losing twice on penalties and once on a goal in the 119th minute. They were so close, so often, but at the same time, a team traditionally laden with attacking talent – all of which will now most certainly retire alongside Messi – could never be completely convincing in those campaigns. It could be argued those results were actually overachievements, but when you have one of the greatest players in history on your team, you’re not supposed to be overachieving. You’re supposed to be dominating, which Argentina never was.

• I enjoyed the fact that, on the same day Messi from ousted from what will likely be his final World Cup, Ronaldo was also ousted in what will likely be his. As I’ve said, the Messi v. Ronaldo debate is one of the dumbest in sports. I legitimately have no dog in this fight. I’ve never had any problem with either of them winning all of the things. (Though whenever Ronaldo’s won anything, some shithouse like Sergio Ramos or Pepe has won them along with him, which I don’t like.) I like both of them and always have.
Ronaldo had very little influence in Portugal’s final game, however, as they were done in by a couple of Cavani goals in Uruguay’s 2:1 win, the first of which being this thing of beauty:

 
Cavani started this play with a long cross-field pass to Suárez, setting up one of the longest give-and-gos in history. He then sneaks off the back shoulder of his teammate and around the back of the defense, who has no idea he’s there. Suárez gives him a perfect return pass. As much as he can be an asscan from time to time, Suárez is also one of the most complete center forwards in the world in terms of his hold-up play (despite his size), his creative movement, and his passing.
And as I’ve said in regards to Messi and also Ronaldo, we probably don’t give guys like Suárez enough credit for how good they are and how complete their games are. These guys can make all the plays. Take them out of the bubble that big clubs afford them and put them on a stage with lesser teammates, when they are forced to expand their roles, and they do whatever is necessary. They score goals, they pick out a pass, they become leaders and coaches on the field. They really do make all the plays.
But there is only so much you can do. Ronaldo managed to drag a limited Portugal side to a European final where, due to an injury, he had to sit and watch them win without him. Messi had two assists and set up three goals against the French, for goodness sakes. What else can he do? It is still a team game, and part of why Uruguay is still playing, while Argentina are going home, is that the Uruguayans play as a team, they do their jobs and play their roles and then turn it over to the duo of Suárez and Cavani to work some magic when needed.
Uruguay played like a legit contender in this game. They’re always defensively stout, and content with defending, but they also have offensive imagination as need be. They don’t necessarily want to play an overly open game, but as was evident in this surprisingly open game with Portugal, they can win that way if they have to. They’ve also done away with much of their previous dependence on rough play and the dark arts over the past decade, as being blessed with forwards the likes of Cavani and Suárez, and Diego Forlan before them, has led to a rethinking of the national team’s approach.
Which is a good thing, because I want to root for Uruguay. I’m pro-Uruguay. It’s secretly one of the most-awesome nations on this earth, they’re playing some great football now, and I decided to make my variation of their national dish for dinner last night:

Chivitos, anyone?

As a Philadelphia friend of mine pointed out, how can you not root for a country whose national dish is a steak sandwich?

• I have nothing at all to say about Croatia beating Denmark on penalties. It was a terrible game, and Croatia were fortunate to survive and advance. I do suspect I’ll have quite a bit more to say about Croatia over the course of the next couple of weeks, however – as in two weeks from now, in fact, when I suspect they’ll be playing in a World Cup final.