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.