Thoughts on the World Cup 1st Round

It's that man again... 

So, the big names up front all came good straight away: nice early returns from Haaland, Mbappe, and Kane - and then dear old Leo outdoes them all!

There was also a strong argument for going for Vinicius Jnr, Havertz, Oyarzabal, Isak, Gyokeres, or Lautaro Martinez; only a couple of those promising forward prospects disappointed in the first game. In Fantasy Premier League, many of these players would be classified as 'midfielders', but in the FIFA game they're all 'forwards' - so, we are rather spoiled for choice. Any of these guys might have a huge game... or a sudden misfire; and there's certainly no way to predict who's going to produce the hugest haul of all. So, it's really just a lottery. 

But it definitely appears that the forward line is the place to concentrate most of our resources. Returns from midfield so far have been fairly disappointing. Only Morocco's Ismael Saibari and New Zealand's Elijah Just - and England's own Jude Bellingham! - look more like 'forwards', or at least attacking midfielders who could get amongst the goals regularly, in that position category. Until Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams come back into the fray - and Spain start getting their shit together - there's not a lot in midfield to tempt us to spend big bucks.

And the new additional points for 'tackles' and 'chances created' seem to have had little impact thus far. None of my selections seem to have earned extra points for this, anyway! And the dreadful FIFA website does not provide any information on these 'game actions': you can't check which players have done well under these metrics. As I'd anticipated, there are some vexing obscurities of interpretation and implementation around these supplementary points awards too. Do 'shots on target' for forwards include goals actually scored?? I would have thought not; but I didn't see Haaland have four non-successful attempts on goal in his game, yet he received 2 additional points under this heading. And I was especially galled that my Marcel Sabitzer didn't get at least an assist for the goal from his corner: does FIFA not allow corners to count as 'assists'?? (Frankly, I thought he might have been credited with the goal; his vicious inswinger looked like it was bound for the net anyway, and the slight deflection off the back of the Jordanian defender's neck was not material.) As with the 'shots on target' for forwards, there's no explanation as to whether 'chances created' includes chances converted (logically, you'd think not - since that would overlap with 'assists'; but the point ought to be made clear, and it hasn't been). And almost every corner creates a chance, surely? Again, I'm bummed that my Sabitzer didn't pick up 2 or 3 extra points for this!!

Also as I predicted last week, the extra point offered for goals from a free-kick looks as if it is going to be otiose. So far, we've seen only a handful of free-kicks awarded within shooting range, and they've all been driven tamely into the wall. There is a good chance that we won't see any free-kick goals in this tournament; it's certainly pretty unlikely that we'll see more than one from any one player - so, this points rule is of absolutely zero relevance in player selection.

A lot of the early leaders in World Cup Fantasy had Messi as their captain. That was utterly, utterly daft. Frankly, given the fact that he's only a week away from turning 39, and that the rest of the Argentine team doesn't really look all that good this year, and that he's been in 'semi-retirement' in the decidedly second-tier American MLS for the past three years,... there wasn't any compelling reason to take a chance on him in a Fantasy squad at all. No-one can seriously have expected that he'd be playing better than in the last World Cup! But even if you had taken that chance - out of sentiment - there was still no reason to be giving him the captain's armband.... after Havertz and Haaland and Mbappe had already delivered high double-digit scores. Everybody should have had at least one of those prime captaincy candidates playing earlier in the MatchDay; and, once they had delivered so well, they should have stuck with them. The same, of course, applies to anyone who gave the captaincy to Harry Kane. They might have got away with it this time; but to transfer the captaincy to Messi or Kane, when you already had 25 or 30 points or more in the bank from an earlier captain, was objectively idiotic.

I already commented the other day on how maddeningly badly designed the FIFA Fantasy website is, in regard to how absurdly fiddly it is to change your captaincy pick (and how nearly impossible it is to check who your captain is). I've just suffered a further huge disaster with it: I had tried to select Mbappe as my 12th Man - but the selection was 'lost'. I am tempted to just give up in a huff now.... The game design is just atrocious. There is a superfluous additional 'Confirm' button which is easily missed, because with things like the captaincy and the chips, you activate these through a separate pop-up window, and that 'action' seems to be already completed and confirmed when you exit that window. I'm not entirely sure whether the further 'Confirm' stage on the main team screen is also wonky; I was pretty sure I'd noticed that and remembered to hit it too - but the next morning, I found no Mbappe in my squad. The forums are awash with similar tales of woe.

It's also exasperating that there is no separate 'stats' page on the site. The only way to try to check stats is through the 'Transfers' page; but that, again, is incredibly fiddly and glitchy, and not built for searching. It is, for example, just about impossible to find options for the possible 'scouting bonus', because although you can select the listing to display according to the ownership percentage, you can only get a top-down or bottom-up arrangement; the best <5% men are somewhere in the middle of a list of 1,250 players - and the display (being one continuous list, with no page-breaks) will freeze, break down before you can scroll down anywhere near that far. So, the 'scouting bonus' candidates are effectively invisible, completely hidden from us. I must have a root around online to see if I can find some third-party stats resources to help with this.

Not that this would make a great deal of difference, I don't think. I observed in my World Cup Fantasy preview post last week that I thought the 'scouting bonus' was going to be too trivial, too rare and too uncertain, to be worth paying much attention to. I had 5 players who, I think, might have been eligible (I hadn't actually chosen them with this primarily in mind; I just happen to be an 'outside the box' thinker....); although 3 of them were displaying as 5.1%-owned by the end of the first MatchDay, and there is no way to check when they reached that level, and if they might have missed out on eligibility by the tightest of margins. As it happened, none of them scored enough points to earn the bonus, anyway - although I did pick up one 'scouting bonus' lift from Aaron Hickey.

The 'big news' of the tournament so far is that the 'minnow' teams are not to be lightly disregarded. Qatar, Haiti, and Saudi Arabia actually outplayed their more fancied opponents for much of their opening matches; Ivory Coast got a surprise win against Ecuador, and Congo and Cape Verde battled to well-deserved draws with two of the tournament favourites, Portugal and Spain, while two other strongly fancied sides, Holland and Brazil, very nearly got beaten by the slightly less illustrious Japan and Morocco. Even the teams that did end up taking a bit of a beating weren't completely overwhelmed, and managed to produce at least a few moments of danger themselves. Poor little Curacao too, who suffered the worst beating at the hands of Germany, at least managed to equalise in that game, and were actually on level terms for about a quarter of the match; the final scoreline was unduly harsh on them. Most of these weaker teams, I suspect, are ultimately going to be undone by a conspicuous weakness in one position (a lack of a reliable finisher upfront or a slightly flakey goalkeeper, etc...), or by shortcomings in stamina or self-belief, a little bit of a lack of nous in game-management: they are not going to be able to hang on to a result like the stronger, more experienced nations can. But they all look like they can play a bit of football: they have some technically gifted players, they can move the ball around well, and occasionally create some threat going forward. We might well get a few more 'upsets' in this tournament - at least in terms of favoured teams failing to keep an expected clean sheet, if not perhaps any surprise defeats (although that is something I'm sure we'd all love to see!).

The most exciting 'surprises', though, have been the USA and Australia - who we'd expected to be decent, but were far more than that, producing two of the best all-around team performances so far. And their young strikers, Falorin Balogun and Nestory Irankunda, look like they might be two of the tournament's breakout stars (adding to the already rather over-stocked roster of forwards we're interested in acquiring...).

The biggest disappointments of the first round have been Turkiye and Switzerland - two nations who've been fairly consistently strong for the past couple of decades or so, and, on paper, look to have enough talent to go maybe as far as the quarter-finals (they were two of my 'dark horse' tips last week); but they both started out with very flat performances that make you wonder if they'll even qualify out of their groups.

Brazil and Spain were arguably even worse; certainly the shortfall from people's hopes and expectations for them was greater! Brazil are lacking balance, and look very weak in defence and in central midfield; Vini and Cunha are always going to be dangerous, but I doubt if that's going to be enough to carry them very far unless Carlo Ancelotti can quickly sort out their numerous other deficiencies. (At the moment, I quite fancy Scotland to be able to put one over on them....) Spain, without their two talsimanic young wingers, were utterly toothless; and Oyarzabal looked woefully out of form; as did Rodri, who, after two years disrupted by injuries, currently looks a shadow of his former self (I'd be starting Zubimendi ahead of him in the next game). I think they have much more potential to turn things around than Brazil do, especially if Yamal and Williams are soon back to their best. (And the superstitious will claim that their opening-match hiccup is actually a good omen for them, since they lost to Switzerland in their first game in 2010, but went on to sweep all before them....)

Most people found Holland and Portugal and Belgium rather disappointing too; but, frankly, they were a bit better than I'd expected. These are teams whose key players are aging badly, and I don't think they have enough strength in depth to go very far in the knockouts. They might even find qualification a little bit of a struggle.

And I'm not yet getting too excited about England's promising start. Yes, it is nice to get a comfortable win over a classy opponent; and that was one of the better performances we've seen from our national team in a major tournament in a long time. It was reassuring that Tuchel was able to make tactical tweaks at half-time which galvanized us into a much more effective second-half performance. But I have misgivings about why we were so bad in the first-half, and why it took until half-time to start sorting any of that out. And even in the second-half, when, with the benefit of a huge psychological lift from Bellingham's goal out of nothing barely 90 seconds after the restart, we completely dominated for 15 or 20 minutes,... we didn't actually manage to create that many clearcut chances, and didn't score. I thought Kane, Bellingham, and Anderson were decent, but hardly outstanding; almost everyone else was frankly a little flat - and I'm concerned at how easily we gave up a couple of goals. Also, Kane and Rice appeared to be limping afterwards - which is a tad concerning.

And how differently might that game have gone if Kane hadn't been given a second chance with that early penalty??  This was a vivid example of how one refereeing decision - a VAR decision! - can have a huge impact on the momentum of a match, and produce a huge swing in the Fantasy points allocations. Big Harry was on that knife-edge between 2-goal hero and penalty-missing chump. And, frankly, the decision felt somewhat unjust: it wasn't one of Harry's better penalties, and Livakovic pulled off a very good save. I suppose it was the 'correct' decision, because Gvardiol had encroached very slightly - and that encroachment was actually of material consequence, since he reached the rebound first to clear it. However, Nico O'Reilly also looked like he was encroaching very slightly on the other side of the box. And ordinarily, such small incursions are ignored - otherwise we'd probably see almost every penalty getting retaken multiple times. And the decision that Livakovic was 'off his line', I just don't get: all the stills I've seen show the back of his right heel still clearly in contact with the goal-line - which is good enough. I think our Harry got very, very lucky with that call. But maybe that's going to be a good omen for England in this tournament....