World Cup: Day 19
There is just nothing like the World Cup knockout stages.
You forget how good it is. All that time spent working out the various third place qualification numbers is over. No one has a secret incentive to come second. It’s just pure sudden death now. These were three of the highest stakes football matches you’ll watch. Let’s get into them.
Brazil 2-1 Japan
They got it wrong, then figured some stuff out and got it right.
Brazil, once again, didn’t really have an idea beyond “get Vinícius running into open space”. But there wasn’t any open space in the game, so they struggled to create any meaningful chances in the first half. All of the big sides seem to struggle with low blocks at this tournament, but Brazil have been struggling for 20 years now! Japan had a pretty easy time shutting this down.
It’s this same flaw that arguably caused Japan’s goal. Right back Danilo Luiz steps up into midfield and wins the ball. He sees that the counter is potentially on, so he’s trying to move the ball up the pitch quickly instead of getting a sustained period of possession. His pass is a little too casual, which allows Kaishu Sano to win the ball back and drive straight through the midfield. Casemiro makes the exact same mistake he did against Morocco: he goes charging towards the ball instead of waiting for the situation to progress. His legs have gone but his brain has not caught up. Sano is able to run straight at goal and score.
Brazil didn’t really have an answer to this until the second half. Carlo Ancelotti took Lucas Paquetá off for Endrick, switching to a 4-4-2 with Viní on the left, Rayan on the right, and Endrick next to Matheus Cunha upfront. “At first we were trying to achieve superiority in midfield, to infiltrate”, Ancelotti explained afterwards. “It didn’t work because their marking was really tight. They were really closed off. We changed at the interval to try to penetrate their area a little more. We crossed some balls and got forward better, so this is an evolution. We struggled to find space at first but we were able to solve this problem very well.”
Carlo, you’ve done my job for me.
Brazil switched to much more of a crossing game, getting the ball in the box for the attackers and midfielders making late runs into the area. It was effective because they had a good mix of inswingers and outswingers, plus plenty of bodies in the box. Gabriel Magalhães got involved with the goal, putting in a deep ouswinging cross from the left onto Casemiro’s head. It’s not very joga bonito, but it works. You can see from the race chart above that Brazil suddenly turned the xG taps on after half time.
The winner wasn’t from a cross, but they did get it wide pretty well to open up space for Gabriel Martinelli. This is basically the rationale behind my favourite football quote of all time: Pep Guardiola explaining his philosophy to Bayern’s players. “In all team sports, the secret is to overload one side of the pitch so that the opponent must tilt its own defence to cope”, he said. “You overload on one side and draw them in so that they leave the other side weak. And when we’ve done all that, we attack and score from the other side”.
That’s what Brazil did in the second half. They got it wide, they opened up space, and they won the game.
Germany 1-1 Paraguay (Paraguay win on penalties)
Germany had the same issue as Brazil, but it didn’t work out this time.
Julian Nagelsmann did the thing people wanted and dropped Jamal Musiala for Deniz Undav. But they didn’t seem to change anything about their strategy because of this. It was all passing around Undav without getting him involved. Look at the passmap from the first half (per the Futi app). They had a lot of possession in Paraguay’s half, but they never got it to Undav as the striker.