Thoughts on the World Cup 2nd Round

 

It has continued to be a colourful and thrilling tournament, with the underdog teams continuing to show a lot of fight, and - in at least a few cases - proving to be much better than most people had expected. (I scarcely find the time to even watch much of England's qualifying campaign, and know next to nothing about almost anyone else's - certainly not any of the teams from outside Europe. But I suppose we should assume that, now that Africa is a pretty strong footballing continent, any team that qualifies out of one of the African groups is probably fairly decent - even if it is a tiny island group with an official population of barely 500,000....)  And Round 2, though it contained more goalless encounters and slightly fewer goals overall than Round 1, still produced an average of 2.75 goals per game - including quite a few absolute belters.

Some of the most fancied contenders - Spain, Brazil, Portugal, Holland, and Switzerland - 'woke up' rather, after very subdued performances in their opening games. Turkiye, South Korea, Belgium, Senegal, Scotland, and Ecuador, alas, did not - although all could still qualify. (If I have one gripe about the new expanded format for the tournament, it is that, with only 4 of the 12 third place teams being eliminated, there's too little jeopardy in this group phase; few, if any, of the 'big names' are in any real danger of going out until the knockout games begin.) 

And England.... stumbled rather, in a frustratingly sterile goalless stalemate with Ghana. We played about 20 minutes of excellent football in the opening game against Croatia, but have looked pretty mediocre for the other 160-odd minutes. And I am finding it a bit vexing that Tuchel hasn't actually played our best eleven yet; I cannot understand why he's rotated out O'Reilly and Guehi, and given only very short minutes to Rashford and Saka. I am tempted to downgrade my expectations for us from likely semi-finalists again to.... likely to exit in the 'Round of 16'.

The star players are continuing to shine: Messi, Vinicius Jnr, Mbappe, Haaland - and even the ageing Cristiano Ronaldo this time - all produced a brace of goals again.

Yet Morocco, the USA, and Mexico are continuing to look probably the best teams so far, in terms of all-around cohesion and consistency.

And, luckily for us Fantasy managers, the unexpected closeness of most of the groups so far - with some of the bigger teams not starting strong and/or supposedly 'weaker' teams proving slightly more formidable than expected - means that we shouldn't see too many mass rotations in this 3rd Round of games. Only Mexico, the USA, Germany and Argentina have definitely secured first-place qualification already; most of the other teams could still theoretically finish as low as third, if the last batch of results goes against them. And the appeal of getting a - probably - weaker opponent in the opening knockout game is usually sufficient to make it quite a big deal even whether a team finishes in first or second place, let alone third (which could put you in a very nasty corner of the draw). So, almost everyone still has a lot to play for over these next four days of competition; and hopefully that means that we won't see the likes of Vini, Haaland, Mbappe, Kane, etc. being rested, as we have so often suffered in the past at this stage of the tournament.

This in turn means that we should be able to hang on to our Wildcards until later in the tournament. If we found that several of the top teams and players were already assured, or very nearly so, of qualifying top of their groups, we'd probably be seeing a risk of huge holes in our squads, and might feel we needed to use the Wildcard here in MatchDay 3. But with the likelihood of accumulating absences from injuries and suspensions in the later MatchDays, as well as the ever-present risk that unexpected eliminations can - probably will - put some huge dents in our squads, it is nice to be able to hang on to the Wildcard as long as possible in these tournaments, as a safety-net. Very often, it proves otiose, because of the increasingly large number of Free Transfers we're given in the later knockout rounds. But if a lot of things suddenly go very badly wrong for us, the Wildcard is very nice to have in such an emergency.

I also tend to feel that this probably isn't a great round for playing any of the 'bonus chips'. Some teams are going to be able to take it easy: we might not see Messi, Pulisic, or any of the popular German players, for example; or only for token run-outs, anyway. Most of the other games could prove to be quite nervy, with so much riding on them; the final round of the group phase tends to be quite low-scoring. And it just so happens that in quite a few of the groups, two of the strongest teams are matched together in the last game, further reducing the likelihood of a one-sided goalfest, and indeed making it difficult to anticipate some of the results altogether: Switzerland v Canada, Japan v Sweden, Norway v France, Uruguay v Spain, New Zealand v Belgium, Croatia v Ghana, and Colombia v Portugal are pretty tough to call, I think. So, I'm hanging on to my chips - even though this now means that I'll have to use one in every round of the knockout phase (as a result of a glitch in the FIFA website that wiped out my attempt to play the '12th Man' on Mbappe in the 2nd Round - gggrrrrr.....).

I noticed more maddening glitches with the web version of the FIFA Fantasy version today: it was freezing up and refusing to process transfers for a couple of hours this morning (though this was outside 'office hours' in Europe, where I imagine the game is based). All seems to be OK again now, thank heavens - a massive 12 hours before the next Round kicks off!

However, I would reiterate my warning about the vexing captaincy glitch in the FIFA game. I recently discovered that you can't switch your vice-captain directly to being your captain - you always need a third player that you can transfer the vice-captaincy to, before he becomes available to select as captain. Since the vice-captaincy is completely redundant in this game, the safest thing to do is place it on one of your players who has a game early in the MatchDay - so all of your other players will be available as potential captains, without the vice-captaincy getting in the way. (This is not a trivial problem. In MD2, I wound up with my vice-captaincy stuck on Nuno Mendes for the last few games, which meant I was unable to transfer my captaincy to him. I wouldn't have chosen to, since I'd already got good returns from Haaland and Messi, but.... he did come up with a 15-pointer, damn him!)

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!!!