 |
| 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.
