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.
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| 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!— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) July 2, 2018
Chadli finishes off a beautiful team play to give Belgium the win late in stoppage time. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/lbUxZDzG0E
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.
