World Cup Thoughts – Day 20

Argentina vs Croatia

Lionel Messi finally has an Argentina team that works, which seems impossible.

Here are some of the names Messi played with at previous World Cups: Roberto Ayala, Esteban Cambiasso, Javier Mascherano, Hernán Crespo, Juan Román Riquelme, Carlos Tevez, Pablo Aimar, Ángel Di María, Juan Sebastián Verón, Gonzalo Higuaín, Walter Samuel, Pablo Zabaleta, Ezequiel Lavezzi, Éver Banega, Paulo Dybala.

Yet it took until now to make it work.

In 2006, José Pékerman’s Argentina cruised through the group stages with Messi on the bench, before losing that spark in the knockout stages. In 2010, Diego Maradona’s team totally lacked organisation and discipline, getting deservedly thumped 4-0 by Germany. In 2014, Alejandro Sabella took them in the complete opposite direction, trying to make the team as solid as possible but suffocating Messi’s brilliance in the process. In 2018, Jorge Sampaoli got just about everything wrong as the players totally refused to buy into his ideas.

Yes, they also reached the final in 2014, but that was a less complete side in my view. They made hard work of most of their games, never putting together a single impressive performance like this one.

But this team works, and I don’t think it’s hard to understand why. Argentina have a disciplined midfield with a good blend of hard workers and technicians. Messi has an attacker running in behind to feed in Julián Álvarez. It’s not rocket science. It’s just a fairly decent team plus Messi.

Croatia’s plan was the same as ever: grind and grind and grind until they can hopefully win the game late. That approach can have some skewed outcomes. To be successful, Croatia really had to keep the game at 0-0 for long periods. Once Argentina score, they really could take the game away.

Source: Opta Analyst

Croatia really did make this work for the first half-hour. They were working the ball through the midfielders and preventing Argentina from creating anything. There’s probably a world in which they pull this off. Considering Croatia were leaving space in behind to stay compact, the breakthrough was always most likely to come from Messi playing a ball over the top for Álvarez, which is exactly what happened. La albiceleste get their penalty and they’re off to the races.

Messi has always enjoyed playing with the sort of striker who wants to run in behind, and Álvarez fits the profile perfectly. You could easily picture him playing the pass to win the penalty for Pedro, Neymar or Sergio Agüero. Álvarez ended the game himself shortly after. Croatia took a corner and were clearly having to push more players forward than they’d like, taking more risks and opening themselves up for that to happen.

Messi put the icing on the cake with his brilliant assist for Álvarez’ second and Argentina’s third. That was that.

Michael Caley was quick to point out on Twitter that, from an xG perspective, this game didn’t look too different to Croatia’s victory over Brazil.

Michael Caley @MC_of_A

hmmmmmmmmm

I think I agree with a fair bit of this. We can quibble with some of Tite’s choices but, at the end of the day, Brazil created a lot of chances against Croatia. They do win that match a lot of the time. This match could have easily turned the same way if not for the early penalty that Messi converted. That’s football, and that’s why we keep coming back: because it destroys your soul thinking about how things could’ve been different.

In a situation where Croatia really had to create chances and score, they didn’t impress at all. The chances they created were all pretty low quality. For all those good technical midfielders, Croatia have set up primarily to frustrate rather than create. No one was really interested in the kind of direct through balls Messi was going for. The whole gameplan was about keeping things at 0-0 and they messed up.

Would Argentina have enough to win the final? Obviously it depends on tonight’s result, but my gut feeling would still favour France. I just feel like the French have a much better variation of what they want to do, and Didier Deschamps will have no qualms about sitting deep to stop those balls over the top. It’s a really intriguing contest.