A game of two halves
Or rather, perhaps, a game of four 'quarters'... The insane Third-Place Play-Off game between England and France was divided rather neatly by the drinks breaks and the half-time interval into four mini-matches - which went mostly to England: 2-0, 2-0, 0-3, 2-1. And this after I'd said that these games were often lame and boring affairs, especially in recent years, and might not be very high-scoring! Oh well, it's not as though I were a lone freak in expressing such misgivings; that was a reasonable and pretty mainstream view. That crazy, crazy game produced more goals than the last three Third-Place Play-Offs combined!!! It was the highest-scoring Third-Place game ever; it was the highest-scoring game in the World Cup for 44 years; it was the 5th highest-scoring game in World Cup history, and arguably the highest-scoring one that was actually quite closely contested (the other big goal-tally games were nearly all pretty one-sided clobberings). And all of that came completely out of nowhere.
Now, to be fair to myself, I had also observed in my post here on Friday that there was a chance this game might prove to be a bit more competitive than most play-off matches of the recent past because both teams - or more particularly both coaches - had more than usual at stake this time. Both were looking to atone for spectacularly disappointing semi-final performances; and for both coaches it looked like it might be the last game in charge - for Deschamps because he had long planned to retire now, after an extraordinary 14 straight years in the job; and for Tuchel because he was fighting to save his job amid the fallout from his abysmal capitulation to Argentina. And so, yes, we had two pretty good attacking teams who were enjoying their football again, with all real pressure removed from their shoulders; two teams who were looking keen to show what they were really capable of after their damp-squib exits from the tournament proper.
Hugely entertaining as it was to watch, though, we can't really say that it was a great game of football. Partly because there were no real stakes in it, and it was played more like an exhibtion match; and also because both sides simply omitted to defend for long periods! Argentina's thrillingly narrow wins over Cabo Verde and Egypt, and Colombia's strangely exhilarating goalless draw against Portugal were the standout games of the tournament. This one, despite being a rollicking good time, just doesn't register in the same way, it doesn't really seem to count.
Has Tuchel saved his job???
I rather hope not. It may have done him a lot of good to have been able to end the tournament on such an unexpectedly positive note with this high-scoring win - to secure "3rd Place" for us for the first time in our history. But there were still a lot of worrying aspects about this match: we didn't show any control in the middle of the park, we were again often flakey at the back, we were completely bulldozed by a re-energized France for much of the second-half and nearly surrendered a 4-goal lead, before rallying again at the end - and once more relying on a solo goal from brilliant Bellingham to rescue the day for us. And the strongest performance of the game for us came from hattrick hero, Bukayo Saka - who, despite having supposedly had 'fitness issues' all tournament, here was able to play the full 90 minutes without any apparent problem at all; indeed, he hadn't shown any signs of discomfort, failing stamina, or shaky form in any of his one-half-only cameo appearances earlier in the tournament; and he insisted after this game that he'd been 'fine' all along. So, what the hell was going on there?? How can you possibly prefer Noni Madueke or Morgan Rogers to an even half-fit Saka,.... let alone a possibly fully-fit one???
So, although that last game was a nice performance and a fun time for all, it had no bearing on the assessment of our overall performance across this tournament - which was mostly at least a little disappointing, and in the semi-final just catastrophically self-harming. And it raised a number of other alarming questions about what's been going on in the camp with selections thus far.
I said last Friday that I thought Tuchel's tactical blunder in giving the game away to Argentina on Wednesday was so egregious that it must surely be unforgivable. And, for me, he made things even worse through his subsequent responses. He initially refused to acknowledge any possible error, insisting that he made the best decision he could in the circumstances. Then, a day or two later, he ramped up his self-defence by claiming that he hadn't told the team to drop into such a low-block, that they just naturally did it of their own accord. This seems obviously disingenuous, dishonest; they really had no other tactical option, after the personnel changes that Tuchel had made at the second drinks break. So, Tuchel was now not merely trying to wriggle out of taking the responsibility himself, but was trying to throw his players under the bus. Even if this really had been true - and I find it absolutely unbelievable - a manager should not do this. He should defend his players as far as possible in public, and take the bulk of the blame on his own shoulders - even if he doesn't feel he deserves it. And he made things even a little bit worse still by implying that it was a problem of the players' mentality, that they get too cautious and too fearful in defending a lead for their country; he even used the horribly tactless phrase that there seemed to be "a problem in the country's DNA." Again, not something an England manager should saying in the wake of such a painful - and avoidable - defeat.
And as I observed the other day, it wasn't just the overwhelmingly defensive substitutions, the stripping away of any possible easy out-ball or counter-attacking options, and the retreat into the very deep 5-4-1 block that were the problems; it was how rigid and how narrow that block was: we again and again left Messi completely unchallenged, allowed him to roam around the edge of our penalty area wherever he liked. In particular, he kept on executing a very obvious short-corner routine on the right to put him into a good position to float in outswinging crosses from just outside the corner of the box. It would have been very easy to stop this; you just have to send one player out to block the passing-lane between the corner-taker and his support player - this is usually automatic when you see that a short-corner is being planned. But we kept failing to do that; and that is where the goals ultimately came from. That is a straightforward problem to fix from the sidelines; but Tuchel apparently did nothing.
Tuchel's failure in that match was not a single error of judgement, but a whole string of them. I've seen a lot of folks online coming to his support and suggesting that you can't condemn a man for 'one bad game'. Well, I don't think you can forgive a national team coach one bad game when it's that bad; and especially not when it's in the semi-final of the World Cup. You don't get any 'free passes' in a game of that magnitude. But his subsequent statements to the press have solidified my opinion from one of viewing his sacking as a regrettable inevitability to seeing it now as a matter of urgent necessity. I felt that his pathetic dodging of responsibility and his inept remarks about the players' supposed psychological failings marked him out not just as a very flawed tactician, but as a liar, a coward, and a shitbag. I don't want a man like that in charge of our national team for one more week. I hope the FA will call him in for a review of his World Cup performance in the next few days - and ask him to resign, or else sack him.
The 'Golden Boot' - does anyone really care??
Remember back in 2018 when Harry Kane won the World Cup 'Golden Boot' award? He only notched a very modest 5 or 6 goals, nearly all of them in the group stage; and I think 2 of them were penalties, 2 were free headers when poor defences forgot to mark him at corners, and one was an inadvertent deflection - which probably should have been credited to the original shooter, Jesse Lingard. The 'best forward' in the competition had done basically bugger-all, and in fact had been so off-the-pace and anonymous in most of the knockout matches that there was a rising clamour in the British press to drop him. But that's the 'Golden Boot' for you; the primary goalscorer with a side that progresses a long way into the tournament is likely to win it, regardless of how well or badly they've played. And while it is a nice little trinket to add to the mantelpiece, I really don't think most players care about this sort of thing very much at all. Well, not once you've won one, anyway! One - however trivial it is at heart - might still be coveted as a career accolade for 'completeness' sake.
Kane was in the hunt for it again this year, but didn't mind sitting out the Third-Place Play-Off to give some of his squad-mates a chance. Bellingham was in the hunt for it, but didn't mind being used only as a late substitute. Mbappé was in the hunt for it... and apparently insisted on playing the whole game on Saturday - preventing Jean-Philippe Mateta from getting a World Cup start to his name. That looks like a case of 'The Ego Has Landed'..... There will always be a few players for whom these silly baubles exercise an irresistible fascination. And that might perhaps be becoming a more common attitude as the modern world becomes more and more focused on statistics and 'major career achievements' in assessing a player's 'greatness'. [I was teasing one of the online Cristiano zealots the other day by mentioning that one of the 60 or 70 players I would personally rate more highly than Cristiano was England's Matt Le Tissier. He had absolutely zero ambition, was content just to play for the joy of the game, and chose to spend his whole career at the small-town club who'd given him his first chance; he turned down moves to big clubs, missed his chance to play for England, and never won shit - except the love and admiration of everyone who ever saw him play. 'Greatness' lies in what you can do on a football pitch, and how that makes the people who watch you feel; it is unquantifiable - its measure exists in the hearts of football lovers, not in dry tables of statistics of number of games played, goals-per-game scored, and major trophies won. Matt Le Tissier was one of the world's great players of the 1990s, but the record books barely noticed him.]
But for me - and for many players too, I know; and, I would hope, for most fans - this award should be an utter triviality, an irrelevance.
The other 'prizes'
The other gongs given out at the end of the tournament do seem to have a little bit more weight and purpose about them than the - largely random - Who happened not to be outscored by anyone else this time? prize. Although I've always felt that clean sheets are a measure of overall team performance which often have fairly little to do with the quality of the goalkeeping; for me, a 'Golden Glove' award ought to be based on the number of saves - and perhaps only the number of 'big saves', or at least with a substantial weighting towards those saves that were particularly impressive technically and particularly important to a match outcome. Again, the best teams who dominate the possession stats and control games well, they may limit their opponent mostly to hopeful shots from distance, which the keeper can gather to his chest without raising a sweat: racking up a lot of 'saves' of this type should not qualify anyone for an award. On my preferred criteria, I think Cabo Verde's Vozinha might have been able to claim this award, and that would have been a popular 'People's Choice'; it would have been nice for Cabo Verde to receive some official recognition for the astonishing contribution they made to this tournament.
The 'Young Player of the Tournament' is usually the most interesting one - and often flags up a player who's going to become a major force in the game for the following decade. However, I feel the age cut-off is a bit niggardly: 21-and-a-half! I don't see the harm in adding another year or two to that. Basically, players only get, at most one shot at winning it; they only have a chance at it if... they break into their senior national team in their teens, and establish themselves as a regular starter within a year or two; if there's then a World Cup scheduled in the narrow window - for most players, a lot less than 4 years - before they exceed the age eligibility threshold; and if their nation qualifies for that World Cup, and they are fit to participate in it. That's an awful lot of 'ifs'; so, it's no surprise that many great players were never in the running for this one. Raising the age threshold by just a year or two would make it much more accessible to more promising young players.
This year, Spain's outstanding 19-year-old defender Pau Cubarsi was a worthy and uncontroversial winner. Though it was a little bit of a pity that the field was thinner than expected: Jamal Musiala had a somewhat limited impact, and Germany unexpectedly crashed out of the tournament early; Johan Manzambi got injured and missed Switzerland's last couple of games; we didn't see much of Cubarsi's teammates Nico Williams, Pedri, or Gavi; and Lamine Yamal, while he played very well, wasn't able to convert his his terrifying wing-play into many concrete attacking contributions. In another year, any of them - or indeed, Mexico's impressive youngster Gilberto Mora (he's only 17, but will be a few months too old to be eligible for the award in 2030) - might have earned this award. But it's nice to see it going to a defender. (And it's nice to see it going to a player who'd unmistakeably earned it; the 2022 award to Enzo Fernandez was a bit of a headscratcher for many of us!)
There are some misgivings about how these awards are decided, though. The voting process is rather opaque; and the preliminary shortlisting by FIFA's 'Technical Study Group' even more so. There defiinitely seems to be a heavy bias towards players facing each other in the Final; and while there might be an argument that they must have made a major impact in the tournament if they've made it all the way to the last round, one suspects that it's more to do with the convenience of knowing that they're going to be on hand for the presentations after the game.
And this year's selection of Rodri was, I found, not merely surprising, but pretty damned baffling. Undoubtedly he was a very influential player in Spain's success. And he did grow into the tournament, improving gradually game by game until he was somewhere near his old self again in the last two or three games of the tournament. But still, I would say, not quite at his level of two or three years ago. And in the opening couple of games he was frankly poor; not just a bit below-par, poor - so poor that there was a strong case for dropping him in favour of Zubimendi. While I like to acknowledge the importance of defensive midfielders, I feel it's difficult to prioritize them in a tournament when there have been so many great performances from more attacking players. And it's even more difficult to see how it's earned by a player whose performances across the whole tournament have been, on average, not that great. I felt Manu Koné and Elliot Anderson were far more impressive in that role this time.
But, really, how could it not be Messi or Bellingham? They both scored a boatload of goals, and, even more strikingly, both demonstrated an unflinching determination to drag the fairly mediocre teams around them through a succession of difficult ties by sheer force of will. These were two of the best individual performances, the most impactful performances for their teams, that we have ever seen in a World Cup; and I would have been happy to see them share the award. I wonder if Jude missed out purely because England didn't reach the Final (and perhaps because of a perception that they weren't really that good, and hadn't deserved to get even as far as the semi-final)? And I suspect Messi may have suffered from a certain ennui towards him (he's been around forever, he's won absolutely everything already - why does he need another prize?), and from the rising unpopularity of his rather niggly and petty team, and from the mounting online backlash against the supposedly excessive amount of 'help' that they'd been getting from referees in the tournament. Many voters probably saw Rodri as a less contentious choice: nobody hates Spain, nobody hates Rodri! And maybe there was an element of sympathy in the selection too: aw, look, he's making a comeback after two years in the wilderness with all those injuries. But, just on the football.... a weird choice!
The inevitable anti-climax
We should not have been surprised that the Final turned out to be so excruciatingly dull. They are rarely anything else. 1986 was good; 1998 and 2006 were quite good; all the others since 1970 have been frustrating anti-climaxes with far less action that we'd hoped for - and often none at all. People got all excited about the 2022 Final because it finally kicked off near the end of regular time, and produced a thrilling period of extra-time and then a tense penalty shootout; but the first 75 or 80 minutes of it had been like watching paint dry. The Quarter-Final and Semi-Final rounds almost invariably produce the best and most entertaining games of any tournament.
This year's, though, suffered especially from the counterpoint with the most improbably thrilling Third-Place game the competition has ever seen the day before. And also.... yes, it was just particularly dull. I fretted before the game that Spain hadn't quite fully clicked (Yamal having to do too much, without Williams on the left to balance him; Oyarzabal struggling to find any consistency in front of goal; Rodri mostly being still quite a long way below his imperious best of a few years ago...), and were struggling to turn their domination of matches into goals. And so it turned out again. Although all of the stats suggested they should have won much more comfortably than they did (and I was gutted to see a couple of good goals get chalked off - probably 'correctly', but very, very harshly - which undid my 3-0 prediction!), things were getting a little bit nervy when they were taken into extra-time without having found any breakthrough.
There was also a problem that Argentina were visibly knackered after a succession of such close and tense games in their path through the knockout rounds, and two gruelling periods of extra-time; their players started dropping out with injuries left and right, and nobody had very much running in them. They also probably showed Spain 'too much respect', sitting off them and trying to contain them, rather than seeking to create any attacking threat themselves; they just weren't able to get Messi on the ball very much in this one - again, much as I'd anticipated.
A sad irony - and the Argentina hate
Because Argentina's strength and stamina were so shot, and because they were being so comprehensively frozen out of the game on Sunday, they did resort to far more niggliness and, as the game went on, downright unpleasantness, than we'd seen from them in the tournament so far - belatedly deserving the previously rather unjustified or at least wildly exaggerated criticisms of their behaviour and their foul-count which have been endlessly echo-chambering online for the past month. And, alas, things really boiled over in some ugly scenes at the final whistle when a number of Argentina players got involved in an unseemly scuffle with some of the Spanish substitutes - throwing at least one of them to the ground, and seeming to throw some wild slaps or punches in their direction too. Some TV commentators reported at the time that Paredes - who seemed to be the ringleader in the fracas, and was lucky not to have been sent off during the match for multiple unfair challenges - appeared to have been shown a red card; though their basis for saying this was never explained, and it was not backed up by anything we saw in the TV pictures. A day later FIFA was saying that he hadn't been; but in clumsy language that made it a little unclear whether he had never been shown a card, or if he had been and they'd decided to surreptitiously rescind it.
Paredes, and one or two of his teammates, deserve stiff sanctions for those unruly scenes; but now that the tournament is over, I doubt if anything will be done. I suspect that FIFA will think that their PR goals are better served by brushing the whole thing under the carpet and hoping people quickly forget about it than by prolonging the media spotlight on this incident - and on the various other dubious bits of tournament management FIFA might be reasonably criticised for - by holding a full investigation, and handing down penalties days or weeks after the event. I think that would be an incredibly dumb decision for them to take. But that's FIFA for you; they are not the conniving 'evil geniuses' the online conspiracy hordes try to make them out to be, they are just dumb, clumsy bastards who keep shooting themselves in the foot.
It is a pity that Argentina let themselves down so badly with their dullest and dirtiest game of the tournament - in what will surely be Messi's farewell to World Cup football. And it is an even greater pity that this escalating niggliness and thuggery was allowed to proliferate and get out of hand by the worst refereeing display we've seen in the whole tournament, from the Slovenian Slavko Vinčić. I really don't know how he was ever selected; with only a handful of Euros and World Cup games under his belt so far (about 50 Champions League games over the last several years, but the majority of them in the group stage), he just doesn't look to me as if he's sufficiently experienced to take on a game of this magnitude. I would say there have only been three or four previous games in the tournament where the refereeing was conspicuously poor - and none of them involved Argentina.
The greatest pity of all is that Vinčić, with his inept performance here, letting so many fouls go unpunished that the match overheated and the Argentinians were completely out of control by the end of it, has belatedly given some genuine ammunition to the conspiracy nutjobs. Yes, in this game - in this one game - it did look like FIFA might be trying to tip the scales in Argentina's favour. But of course they weren't; it was just a referee being overwhelmed by the occasion and having a very, very bad day. Even the most 'biased' - the only 'biased' - referee we've had taking charge of an Argentina match in the tournament was completely unable to swing the match their way. And so all the conspiracy nutjobs have left now is to whinge endlessly about the injustice of Paredes not being sent off after the game had finished. - which might indeed be unjust, but clearly could not have affected the outcome of the game, and thus cannot fit within any conspiracy theory of how FIFA was supposedly trying to secure another win for Argentina.
And I've said this before, but I'll say it again: where is the motivation for any such shenanigans supposed to come from? Messi is a has-been: he effectively retired from proper competitive football when he joined America's MLS three years ago, and this was surely his swansong on the international stage. He has ZERO ongoing value to FIFA in boosting their global brand image and revenues. And Argentina have always been a deeply unpopular footballing nation with almost every country on the planet, so.... what possible advantage is there to FIFA in trying to promote a disliked team and an ageing star player who's about to retire?? Absolutely NONE; it's utter nonsense.
My high school history teacher was fond of saying: "There are two main theories of the historical causation of major events: conspiracy and cock-up. 999 times out of every 1,000, it's the latter."
Argentina might have caught a few more breaks from the refs than most other teams over the tournament; they certainly were cut a lot of slack by the hapless Mr Vinčić in the Final. But it's just an accumulation of minor errors working slightly in their favour, not a decisive factor in their success in this tournament - and certainly not part of an abstruse masterplan.
A Fantasy calamity
The polar extremes of the last two games constituting the World Cup Fantasy game's MatchDay 8, a humongous points bonanza in the often dull-as-ditchwater Third-Place game and a sterile goalless (at least, in regular time...) Final, meant that people who'd included plenty of French and English players in their teams prospered hugely. People who guessed correctly that Mbappé would force Didier Deschamps to let him play the full game did particularly well. Those who'd taken a punt on Saka finally being allowed to play a full game did even better... Those who bet once again on Jude Bellingham have never been disappointed in this tournament - even though he only got on for a short outing at the end.
Those who were able to hang fire on their MD8 selection until shortly before the Third-Place kick-off enjoyed a huge advantage in knowing for sure who was going to start in that game. (This is one of the reasons I don't like live in-game substitutions; it creates a massive disadvantage for people in unfavourable timezones, who may not be able to stay up half the night to swap things around immediately before or between games. People often lobby for Fantasy Premier League to introduce a similar facility; but I feel that would be unfair on the many people in East Asia and Oceania who like to play the game.) And, as I observed in my post-Semi-Finals review, you probably couldn't afford to set up especially for the Third-Place game unless you had your Wildcard still available to use. (And if you did, as I did, that would cut you off from being able to use one of your other chips in MD8. The 'Maximum Captain' chip, in particular, could have been very valuable in this round, as it was so uncertain who would actually produce the weekend's big points.)
And so, really, for most people, the entire Fantasy competition was decided on the final weekend. If you'd backed the right players in the Third-Place Play-Off, you might have racked up a pretty huge total. If you'd backed the wrong players in that game and/or had concentrated largely or solely on players in the Final (because you didn't have a Wildcard left to make multiple changes), you were utterly screwed and might have ended up with just 30 or 40 points. (Yes, that's what happened to me: I crashed from being top in all my mini-leagues to bottom!!!)
It is a cruel and capricious game, indeed.
But now that it's over for another four years, I'm missing it already....
