A good tournament capped by a good final

At the start of the FIFA 2018 World Cup, I posted on Facebook that for a month various peoples of at least 32 nations in the world will be united for their country. What ensued in the tournament truly made a case for national unity. Just about every player in every team played their heart out in their country's jersey. How else would you have Russia (the lowest ranked team) in the quarter finals? That South Korea beat defending champs Germany and knocked them out in the first round. 

 

A tournament like this deserve a final to match. And we got it: as the Telegraph succinctly puts it,  "truly, madly, deeply". We will miss this World Cup like no other. The day after Bastille Day France are champions and deservedly so. But only after the most remarkable, crazy and controversial encounter against a courageous Croatia in which there was a VAR storm, and an actual storm in the skies above Moscow, a first-ever own goal in a World Cup Final, a cool strike from a new global superstar, an horrific goalkeeping blunder by the man who lifted the trophy - and a Pussy Riot pitch invasion.

 

To secure its status as the best ever World Cup the tournament needed a memorable final. It got it. What a finale it was to this 31-day festival of football, as Gareth Southgate called it, and it was the highest-scoring final since England beat West Germany 4-2 in 1966. Well, they sang football’s coming home. At least the score was the same and while England and their fans will never stop dreaming of what might have been - just 22 minutes from the final, if anyone needed reminding - France have the 18-carat gold, 14-inch, 11lb trophy for the second time ever and the second time in 20 years.

 

What struck me most was how equal the game has become globally. Yes, all the semi-finalists were Europeans but many players including the winning French team had more than half their players who are immigrants or sons of immigrants. I spoke to a French colleague today and wish her and her country all the best in national integration and healing. Well, one can dream!

 

It also occurred to me that the way to win it has evolved. Possession and passing especially that practiced by Spain won it for them. France was happy to let the opponent keep possession and attempt shots from distance. They defended stoutly and were clinical when they had to strike. Efficient, fast and most of all productive. They make it look easy.

 

Third, it is such a mental game. Many of the upsets were caused not by a lack of skill but because players gave up playing. From the antics of Neymar to the defeatist body language of Messi, teams lost it in their minds before they lost it on the pitch. The most egregious example is Kieran Trippier. He was so devastated by Croatia's late strike, he couldn't play on in the semi-finals when his country was trailing and left them with 10 men with 10 minutes to play. Talk about losing it!

 

Croatia deserves more. They were the tournament's heart. But as M put it, and i parphrase her, the head won

Luka Modric (& Zvonimir Boban) by Boris Starling

The old man took his cattle up the hill that morning in December 1991, because that’s what he did every day, rain or shine, winter or summer. He took his cattle up the hill that morning, and he never came back. A handful of men in police uniforms arrested him. Whether or not they were legally police officers was moot, and it was also irrelevant: round these parts, power came from the barrel of a gun, not from a piece of paper.

 

The man’s crime was the same crime it always is in places riven by sectarianism: not being one of them. Being the other. Being the enemy. His crime was nothing he’d done: it was who he was. He was Croatian, they were Serbian. That was all there was to it. The men took him and a few others to the nearby village of Jesenice, and there they were executed. The old man left behind a family whom he loved and who loved him: none more so than his six-year-old grandson with whom he shared a name and from whom he had been practically inseparable, the old man doting on the boy, the boy hero-worshipping his grandfather.

 

The name they shared was Luka Modric, and this Sunday that small boy, now 32, will lead his country out in the World Cup Final.

 

Football uses the language of war: strikes, shots, volleys, attacks, defence, bombardment. Modric, like all his countrymen, knows the difference between the real thing and the game: knows too that in Croatia one is always bound up with the other, because between them they are the history of that small, proud nation writ large.

 

After his grandfather was murdered, Luka’s family’s house was burned down, and they had to live in a hotel for years: not an expensive comfortable one, but a basic, crumbling one in their hometown of Zadar. When the mortars fell, as they often did, young Luka would sit inside and wait them out: but when the all clear was given, he’d be off playing football in the hotel car park, sometimes with other kids, sometimes on his own. Anything to escape the grim, numbing reality of living in a perpetual state of conflict.

 

He was a small kid: too small, as it turned out, to be taken on by the local bigwigs Hadjuk Split. He ended up playing aged 18 in the Bosnian-Hercegovinan league for Zrinjski Mostar, which was where both team-mates and opponents discovered two things about this kid: that he had all the skills you could want, and that he could look after himself too.

 

Fast forward 15 years, through a journey that has taken him from Dinamo Zagreb via Tottenham Hotspur to Real Madrid. Even though he still looks like, in the unimprovable words of the Guardian’s Barney Ronay, ‘a little boy dressed as a witch’, he is now one of the best players in the world: a midfielder of fabulous talents, one of the very few who can bend time and space to his will.

And of all those talents, perhaps the greatest is this: that he makes others play better. When the simple pass is the best option, that’s what he plays. When he needs to hold the ball for a few moments so his team-mates can get into better positions, that’s what he does. When he has to cover back after someone else’s mistake, that’s what he does.

 

He’s not one of those superstars whose megawattage draws the eye and the play too, whose own presence inhibits the other ten men wearing the same shirt as him. He’s the ultimate leader precisely because he doesn’t make it all about himself. You won’t find him rolling around as though he’s just stepped on a landmine, or ripping his shirt off when he scores, or standing there looking haunted when things aren’t going his way. He leaves that kind of stuff to Neymar, to Ronaldo, to Messi. They’re all home already. He’s still there, and so are his team. And his team love him. When he missed a penalty late in the match against Denmark, his team-mate Ivan Rakitic gathered the others round. 'Listen,' he said. 'Lukita's got us out of more messes than we can count. It's our turn to repay him.' The Croatians put the miss behind them and won the subsequent shoot-out, with Rakitic slotting the winning kick.

 

But if you want to know what Modric is made of, here it is: only a few minutes after missing that penalty, he'd taken another one in the shoot-out, with the Danish keeper Kaspar Schmiechel in his face trying to put him off. Did he score second time round? Of course he did.

 

It’s hard to understand – no, it’s easy to understand, but hard to properly FEEL – what this Croatian side mean to their country. The most famous image in English football history is that of Bobby Moore lifting the World Cup. The most famous image in Croatian football history, by contrast, is that of Zvonimir Boban taking a flying kick at a riot policeman.

 

It was during a match between Dinamo Zagreb and Red Star Belgrade in 1990, not long after Croatia had effectively voted for secession from Yugoslavia by electing a majority of pro-independence parties to their parliament. Boban saw the policeman mistreating Dinamo supporters during a riot and launched himself head high at the man. ‘Here I was,’ Boban said later, ‘a public face prepared to risk his life, career, and everything that fame could have brought, all because of one ideal, one cause; the Croatian cause.’ Boban was sacked from the Yugoslavia team who went to the World Cup that year. He didn’t care. In his own mind he was Croatian, not Yugoslavian, and eight years later he captained Croatia to third place in their very first World Cup. He was leader of a generation of fabulous players - Slaven Bilic, Robert Prosinecki, Davor Suker - who to this day are revered in their country.

 

 

 

In reaching the final, Modric’s men have already gone one better than their predecessors. It’s fitting that they’re playing France: both sides have played three group matches and three knockouts, with Croatia the stars of the group stage and France the best team in the knockouts. The smart money has to be on France. They are a better team overall, and they have won all their knockout matches in normal time where Croatia have been taken to three consecutive extra times: an additional 90 minutes of football, the equivalent of an entire match more.

 

My head says a French victory, perhaps even an easy one. But my heart says a Croatian win, for the fairytale of the underdogs, for a proud people forged in war, and most of all for their remarkable captain and the old man after whom he was named.

 

 

 

As it turned out, the French won. Modric didn't play all that well in that final match but still well enough to be the best player of the tournament (winning the golden ball trophy) and received a warm hug from his president and many others.

World Cup 2018: The Tragicomic Opera of Croatia’s Mario Mandzukic bySam Knight

The month long football fever that afflicts Planet Earth once every 4 years is nearly over. This 2018 edition is said to be one of the best, from number of goals scored to the nice surprise of upsets (South Korea vs Germany, Croatia vs Argentina, Belgium vs Brazil are three clear victories that jump to mind). Along with upsets, it is not just favourite teams (Ronaldo's first match impact notwithstanding) but also big players who didn't perform. One big name (Neymar) had more minutes (14) of feigned injuries than moments of brilliance. It is this that leaves a bad taste in the mouth for some sports spectators and also this that makes football the highest in melodrama. The New Yorker article that follows caught my eye.

As surely as the leaves come off the trees in fall, toward the end of any football match that goes to extra time, a player will crumple to the turf with cramp. It normally happens off camera, away from the ball—suddenly he’s sitting there, rooted and unmoveable. It’s cramp! He shrugs, like it’s never happened before, and there’s nothing he can do. Someone runs over to help him up. No dice. Cramp, I’m afraid! And he stays where he is. Everyone knows that cramp is painful as hell, but no one knows whether extra-time cramp is real. The players who seize up are usually on the side that is winning, or at least running the clock down. In the olden days, you used to see players from opposing teams stretching each other out, like gym buddies, and then rising to stagger on, socks rolled down. But that’s gone. Now it’s a shake of the head. Staying down. Cramp, you see.

 

In the second half of extra time in Croatia’s tough, resourceful World Cup semifinal victory over England, the player going down with cramp was Mario Mandžukić, the thirty-two-year-old forward, who plays his club football for Juventus. Mandžukić, like the rest of Croatia’s team, had been crassly overlooked—by the British media, anyway—in the buildup to the match. He has won more club trophies than all the members of the England team combined. But don’t let that get you down. The whole deal with England in this World Cup was that the nation wasn’t getting carried away. The team was young and played without pressure; Gareth Southgate was our normcore manager. But, after the team beat Sweden in a surprisingly competent manner last Saturday, all that went out the window. People started singing spontaneously on trains. Fans rampaged through an ikea. Car horns honked all night. The old blood-thickening hope, the old “Football’s Coming Home” entitlement, came swamping back, and everyone started making plans for the final. Croatia, who?

Further Reading

More coverage of the 2018 World Cup from The New Yorker.

Mandžukić, in fairness, is the kind of forward who is easy to miss. The game naturally celebrates players who like the ball at their feet, who set rhythms, weave passes, and waltz past opponents. But there are other footballers, who are masters of space—with what is not there—and who are more than equally effective. Mandžukić is one of those. You don’t tend to hear his name much in commentary, until it’s “Mandžukić!” And he’s there, six yards out, hammering the ball toward the goal, normally with a single touch. In April, I watched Mandžukić snaffle two first-half goals, both instinctive headers, in a 3–1 victory for Juventus over Real Madrid in the Champions League. He was the man of the match, and you weren’t even sure he was there.

I watched the semifinal—curled on the floor and wracked with hope—and I swear that Mandžukić didn’t touch the ball until the eighty-third minute. England had led for a little more than an hour, after Kieran Trippier slippered a free kick into the top corner. But, in the second half, Croatia took a grip on the game. Luka Modrić, of Real Madrid, and Ivan Rakitić, of Barcelona—pros to England’s ams—started snapping the ball around. Ivan Perišić, the Internazionale winger, scored a deft equalizer, and then, with no warning, Mandžukić was taking the ball on his chest and thumping it toward Jordan Pickford’s near post.

Mandžukić’s nine-minute, operatic breakdown—a syncopated series of stops, starts, and seizures, which defined the match, and took it away from England—began in the final moments of the first period of extra time. Perišić, who was a menace all night, whipped in a fast low cross from the left and “Mandžukić!” materialized four yards out and made contact. But he and the ball collided with Pickford, who lept out and made a brilliant save. After the collision, the Croatian lay on the ground for some time. When Mandžukić limped off to prepare for the final fifteen minutes of the game, he pulled his shorts halfway down his thighs, as if he might be done for the night.

And then he was down on the grass. Cramp. Sorry! Mandžukić sat on the edge of England’s penalty area. He made the international gesture for “Not my fault.” John Stones, Kyle Walker, and Harry Maguire, England’s back three, stood over him, alternately offering a hand. No good. Cramp, guys. Eventually, Mandžukić got to his feet, somehow. He trotted around for a few minutes. He definitely seemed hurt. He went down again. The same rigmarole. Maybe Mandžukić was in real trouble. Maybe the England defenders, against their better judgment, thought that he was no longer a threat. Because, in the eighteenth minute of extra time, Walker took an ungainly, tired swing at a Croatian cross. The ball popped up. Perišić nodded it vaguely back toward the England goal and, for an instant, Mandžukić had the space that he needed, and had searched for, all night. It wasn’t much. A yard of grass all around. With his left foot, he lashed the ball across Pickford and into the net, and then ran all the way to the Croatia fans and the TV cameras, where everyone got in a tangle and started kissing one another. Time ran out on England after that. Mandžukić went down one final time. With six minutes to go, Zlatko Dalić, the Croatia manager, called him off. The man was done. He limped all the way to the sideline.