Defender Pedro Porro, right, celebrates his second-half goal in Spain's 2-0 win over France in the World Cup semi-finals on Tuesday.PAUL ELLIS/AFP/Getty Images
The nadir of French football is called the Knysna incident, after the town in South Africa where it happened.
At the 2010 World Cup, France was a shambles. After an early loss, a French player got into it with the coach in terms too blue to repeat here. The coach benched the player. The rest of the team responded by allowing themselves to be bussed to a training ground – where cameras were waiting – but then refused to get off said bus. It’s a weird sort of strike that involves chauffeuring in a luxury coach.
The fiasco escalated into a political crisis, which resulted in an overhaul of the French Football Federation. The French team that was supposed to cruise into Sunday’s World Cup final is the result of those changes.
Was supposed to. In Tuesday’s first semi-final, 15 years of steadily escalating French hype ran into an Iberian reality. The game ended 2-0 for the “underdogs.” If you saw it, you’d put double quotes around that word.
Spain reaches final by silencing France’s star-studded attack
The end of the myth started with France’s Lucas Digne spinning around blind in the box, a la Bruce Lee smashing a cinder block, and connecting instead with Lamine Yamal.
Yamal had no chance of doing anything with the bouncing ball, but he had a) the willingness to run into danger and b) the understanding that Digne was the likeliest French defender to make such a boneheaded error. Spain scored from the resulting penalty. That was essentially that.
Digne chops down Yamal in France's penalty area, leading to the opening goal.Lee Smith/Reuters
The remainder of the game featured France running into a thicket in the Spanish midfield. On the rare occasions it struggled through the middle third, it had nothing left to give the Spanish defence. France, an unstoppable force as of a few hours ago, barely elicited a save from the opposing goalkeeper.
How did everyone get it so wrong?
This is in the nature of the World Cup. There can’t be a few decent teams, all of whom have a an equal chance at winning. That’s not the sort of thing you can wrap a Nike campaign more narratively elaborate than Berlin Alexanderplatz around. There must be one unassailable favourite.
France was too delicious to pass up. They had the best player in the world (Kylian Mbappé) and the reigning world player of the year (Ousmane Dembélé) and the most underrated superstar in the game (Michael Olise).
Mbappé reacts after the loss as Rodri of Spain celebrates.David Ramos/Getty Images
It’s a lot more fun to talk about things in superlatives than it is to say what is always true – that no one has any idea who will win. They can take a stab at it, and they can explain why it went the way it did after the fact, but there are no fortune tellers in sports. Just a bunch of guessers with audiences.
So everyone decided beforehand how this would go best. Mbappé would set the all-time record for goals scored in a World Cup. Retiring French coach Didier Deschamps would leave considered the best ever at his job. France would cement its place as the 21st century’s Brazil. An unstoppable offensive force, built for purpose by the finest developmental system ever devised, a testament to the power of tolerance and European openness.
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It’s a great story, but it can’t play defence.
The problem with France is obvious now. All of its best players do one thing − score goals. Someone has to stop them as well.
The further back you got in the French roster, the thinner the talent. Mbappé, Dembélé and Olise are all stars still on the rise. Digne is a veteran in decline.
Yamal aside, Spain isn’t nearly as sexy. Its best player is a defensive midfielder. It isn’t poetic or particularly fashionable – France is – which means most of the world isn’t used to seeing its players on TikTok.
Also, they all kind of look alike – same visitor-from-the-near-future haircut, same bland handsomeness. The only one you can always pick out from above is Marc Cucurella, because of his Sideshow Bob look.
Cucurella, right, obstructs Kylian Mbappé's path to the Spain net on Tuesday.Tony Gutierrez/The Associated Press
But when you look at the record, Spain should have been the main talking point. It is the defending European champion, having gone through Germany, France and England to get there. It hadn’t lost in 36 matches going into Tuesday’s encounter. It is stacked tip to tail with overlapping, high-end talent. And it has a pretty great system, too.
Spain used to be France – the can’t-miss squad that could find a way to miss. No wonder it was so quiet here. Were this a wholly North American affair, you’d have heard grumbling about France getting all the press. Spain knows how that goes and wanted no part of it. It was happy to be stuck in the second tier with the Argentinas and Englands. Less pressure on it, and more on France.
Once Spain tied Cape Verde in its first game in America, everyone gave up on it. Again, what a boon. For a month – long after Cape Verde put similar scares up Uruguay and Argentina – nobody’s paid much attention to Spain. The consensus was good, but probably not great.
You could see on Tuesday how supple that made Spain, and how brittle it rendered France. By the looks on their faces, the French could not believe how comprehensively they were being outplayed. Once the first goal went in, they got slower, more methodical, when the game called for speed.
It was as if France believed they would not be allowed to lose. What will Nike have to say about this? Where’s Gianni Infantino when he’s actually needed? By the time the French had begun to accept their fallibility, they’d lost.
It’s great news for the next manager, reportedly French legend Zinedine Zidane. Now he gets to save French football, again. Here’s guessing that if anyone says the word “favourite” to a French player over the next four years, the interviewee will slap the microphone out of their hand. They’re underdogs again.
And Spain? It has to do two things now. Play on Sunday as it did on Tuesday, and resist at all costs the obvious conclusion by many millions of experts that there is now no way it can be beaten.