World Cup: Day 16
Ok, we’re nearly done with these six game days that my brain can’t handle because of all the two screen nonsense. We’ve nearly reached sanity. We just need to keep going.
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Group I
Norway 1-4 France
Senegal 5-0 Iraq
France turned up in the first half. Then things got a little wonky.
The thing about this French team is that Didier Deschamps does not particularly work on attacking patterns of play. Olivier Giroud (who played an awful lot of games for Deschamps) was asked this on BBC recently and mumbled through an answer that basically said “the players figure it out on the pitch”. He likes a lot of defensive structure and solidity, especially in the knockout stages, but he’s happy for his attacking stars to find the solutions themselves.
In my head this is a very “French” attacking approach, but that’s probably just because I associate it with Arsène Wenger. It’s not very fashionable in the modern club game, but it can work in a different environment. France’s attack can be brilliantly unpredictable because they don’t have defined patterns of play. But it does rely on having pieces that fit together. There have been tournaments where Deschamps’ France have looked really fluid and exciting, while other times when they looked totally dead and dull.
This team is obviously the “fluid and exciting” version. It was Ousmane Dembélé’s day to show why he’s so useful on the right. Michael Olise can pick up the ball in central areas and he always has a choice of passing three ways: forward to Mbappé, right to Dembélé or left to whichever one of Désiré Doué or Bradley Barcola is on the pitch. Dembélé coming into the team four years ago made everything click because you can’t get narrow against France anymore. They’ll stretch you wide and they’ll stretch you in behind. You feel like you need to get tight to Dembélé because he’s so good, but that’s going to leave gaps elsewhere. One of these attackers will be in space.
Dembélé had the sort of game where three shots from range all went in. That’s both a testament to his ability and not likely to happen in every game. But France have so many different players who can kill you.
They gave away a stupid penalty in the second half and were fortunate that Norway decided to rest Erling Haaland. As often happens with France, the tempo dropped once they had the three points in the bag. Onto the next one. France will play Sweden in the Round of 32 and you vaguely suspect Graham Potter will play right into their hands. Norway have a tie against Ivory Coast that could go either way.
Senegal, meanwhile, knew that a stronger goal difference would boost their chances of staying in the competition, so they kept going.
This is a rare win for the new group stage format. Senegal were incentivised to score lots of goals in the second half. They got ahead through a set piece early on, then Iraq’s Rebin Sulaka picked up a red card. Senegal did a whole lot of nothing for most of the first half, at which point I’d have to think manager Pape Thiaw’s half time talk was “guys, what are we doing? We need to score more goals!” Well, it worked.
Senegal are into the whole third place route and it makes my head hurt trying to understand who they will play next. So I guess we’ll find out.
Group H
Uruguay 0-1 Spain
Cabo Verde 0-0 Saudi Arabia
Some of the best, most exciting football matches I’ve ever seen have been Marcelo Bielsa sides going aggressively man-for-man against Spanish-style possession football teams.
This… was not as good as those.