World Cup: Day 11
Ok, ok, I’m running late so let’s not waste time and get straight into it.
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Spain 4-0 Saudi Arabia
Welcome back, Lamine Yamal. Thank you for making my point about width and runners.
Spain, thankfully, got something closer to genuine wingers into the team in Yamal and Álex Baena. We saw the impact straight away. Striker Mikel Oyarzabal — himself a winger by trade earlier in his career — drifts out to the left flank to run at Saudi Arabia at pace. I normally wouldn’t like the striker vacating the box like this, but it works because Yamal is making a run towards the far post. Oyarzabal is able to play a simple low cross to Yamal and it’s 1-0 to España after ten minutes. It reminds me of the kind of goal Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City used to score over and over again with Leroy Sané and Raheem Sterling. It’s real positional football rather than the endless passing bollocks.
It’s rare that I praise UK TV punditry here, but Thomas Frank made exactly the right point on BBC at half time: this is the kind of goal Yamal needs to be scoring to reach the level he wants to be at. If we look at his shot map in La Liga this season (not including penalties or direct free kicks), he likes a low value shot from further out much more often than a tap in. This looks great on the highlight reel, but it’s the profile you’d expect from a “scorer of great goals, but not a great goalscorer” as the old line goes.
By comparison, here is Lionel Messi in the 2014/15 season. Notice how few of them are tiny dots on the right. For all of Messi’s incredible efforts from range and dribbling sequences, this makes him look more like a “proper striker” than anything else. If you want to score 30+ goals a season, you have to accept most of them won’t be bangers. Yamal is the best teenager in the world, but this is what he needs to work on if he wants to take his game to the next level. If Yamal’s shot locations start looking like Messi’s below then the sky is the limit.
Spain got a second from a scruffy corner sequence, with Oyarzabal being quick enough to react first and get it past the goalkeeper. The third came before half time, as Spain shifted it from side to side before finding Oyarzabal right in the six-yard box. It was really well-executed Spanish football.
As you’d expect, the tempo dropped in the second half. That’s fine. The game was won and everyone wanted to move on. But Spain were really good when they needed to be, fixing the issues we saw in the opening match.
According to Michael Caley’s model, Spain look most likely to face Austria or Morocco in the Round of 32. They will be obvious favourites against either opponent.
Belgium 0-0 Iran
Oh, baby, no.
Belgium made the call to start Romelu Lukaku this time, while Jérémy Doku had left the camp because his wife was due to give birth. Doku felt like a huge loss here for many of the reasons Yamal felt like a gain for Spain. His replacement Alexis Saelemaekers doesn’t have the same ability to stretch the play by dragging players wide. It’s easy to imagine Doku’s dribbling sucking Iranian defenders towards the ball, opening up spaces elsewhere. That didn’t happen here, which made Belgium much more predictable.
At the same time, Lukaku looked visibly short of full fitness. His body couldn’t pull off the runs his brain knew to make. Belgium didn’t look right with Charles De Ketelaere upfront in the first game and they didn’t look right here with Lukaku. This might be a problem.
Things got bad after 67 minutes when Nathan Ngoy got himself sent off for a last man challenge. It’s probably testament to Iran not being up to much that this didn’t shift the momentum of the game. As you can see from the xG, Belgium did have the chances to probably win this game. They also were not especially impressive about it.
Uruguay 2-2 Cabo Verde
Ladies, gentlemen, non-binary friends, let’s talk about the “bad” version of Marcelo Bielsa.