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| 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:
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| 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.
