4 new thoughts

Switzerland score at the gun

1. Playing to Win
If there was ever a game where the teams should've been content to take the 1:1 draw, it was the mess of a game between Switzerland and Ecuador where both teams gave up sloppy set piece goals and squandered all sorts of chances. Instead we got the nuttiest ending in the history of the World Cup. The Seferovic goal at 93' capped off 90 seconds of frenzy – an Ecuadorian player going on a 70 yard sprint with the ball, passing off for a shot but then Ecuador squanders the chance, the Swiss tackle desperately and promptly break 90 yards the other way, with a Swiss midfielder getting run over but then stumbling back to his feet fast enough to compel the ref to play the advantage, leading to this jailbreak with Seferovic making about a 60 yard diagonal run and scoring the goal. The Swiss have been dull and defensive in the past, but this team is very young and has some skill to it. I've been hating on the Swiss for a while now, but this was pretty compelling stuff.

2. What the H was that?
Who on earth thought it would be a good idea for Honduras to try and get physical with France? The French are HUGE. That wasn't going to end well. The H went a man down, conceded a penalty, ran up a large number of yellow cards, and gave themselves no chance. C'mon, H, you have to be a little smarter than that.

3. Lionel Messi is a bad, bad man

Sick

How do you stop this? Messi creates his own space like no player I have ever seen. This was just a simple give and go with Higuain, and Messi makes a masterpiece out of it. Just making those small little dribbles running parallel to the 18 at that pace give him room and have the Bosnians falling all over themselves. He is impossible to defend, simply because the things he can do with the ball just don't make sense to normal humans. Argentina muddled about for a lot of this game, as Messi found himself hounded by a posse of Bosnians for most of the game, but then he does something like this and it doesn't matter. Brilliant.

4. Play to your strengths
Bosnia scored 30 goals in qualifying, but decided to go conservative vs. Argentina, opting to only play 1 striker and feeling like they couldn't play run and gun – and since the Argentine frontline players scored 122 goals between them in the club season, you can see why Bosnia were thinking that way. Thing was, the Dragons controlled most of the middle of the game after clownshoesing an own goal 2' into the game to find themselves a goal down. Their typical, dynamic 2-striker format would've served them well at that point, but their usual crisp last third play was amiss. This was a case where the Bosnians may have outsmarted themselves. You gotta play to your strengths. Bosnia's strengths are offense, offense, and offense. They could possibly lose 5-2 to the Argentines in a firefight, but they had NO chance to win playing it close to the vest.