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| A work of goddamn art |
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.
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| 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:
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| 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.
