Saudia Arabia are 2,000-1, but the chances are one of the top six in the bookies’ odds will lift the World Cup on 15 JulyHow do you build a team around a player without being reliant on him? The tightrope that Jorge Sampaoli has to tread with Lionel Messi is made of a spider’s silk but if he manages to strike the right balance this could be Argentina’s time. It is 32 years since they won the World Cup, 25 since they won a major tournament, an implausibly barren run for a generation that has included some of football’s great talents. Ángel Di María and Paulo Dybala could do with stepping up to help Messi, as they can, but have...
Twenty years after their only World Cup success France may look at their resources and believe the time for a repeat has comeNapoleon met disaster in Russia after sending almost half a million soldiers on an invasion that began in the summer of 1812 and ended in humiliation. Didier Deschamps, with only 23 men in his Grande Armée, will be hoping for a better outcome in the coming weeks. For a start the inhabitants of Moscow are unlikely to have burnt the place to the ground by the time his squad pitch camp next week in a Hilton hotel 50km west of the city walls.France are ranked fourth in the World Cup betting behind Brazil, Germany and Spain. Twenty years...
One of the greatest World Cup games has been largely overshadowed by the West German keeper’s dastardly actThe semi-final stage of the World Cup has, on balance, not been particularly kind to France. In 1958, the free-scoring team of Just Fontaine and Raymond Kopa were more than holding their own against Brazil until Vavá clattered into the captain Robert Jonquet; as the defender’s leg sailed in an arc across the Stockholm sky, France’s hopes and dreams, in those days before substitutes, departed with it. In 1986, Les Bleus faced West Germany with star man Michel Platini only half-fit; the rest of the team failed to turn up until the last 10 minutes or so, by which time it was far...
In open rebellion against their manager, France’s 2010 squad self-destructed as Thierry Henry watched impassivelyThierry Henry had more pressing matters to attend to before he could lose himself in his New York dreamscape [he was joining New York Red Bulls from Barcelona in the summer 2010], starting with his uneasy position within the French national team. How uneasy it was was demonstrated in the lead-up to the South African World Cup, when Raymond Domenech chose to play Henry from the bench in France’s warm-up games against Costa Rica and Tunisia, in which the hitherto “captain for life” was a mere passenger.In the first of these two encounters, in which Les Bleus actually showed a surprising degree of enterprise and imagination,...
The French celebrated a historic home victory while the rest of the world wondered what had happened to the previously imperious Ronaldo as he sleepwalked through the finalAs the Brazilian national anthem floated around the Stade de France, the camera kept lingering on one man. His identity was not a surprise. Ronaldo, after all, was the greatest player in the world, O Fenomeno, the star of a Brazil team that was hoping to become the first to retain the World Cup on two separate occasions. Nothing unusual about that, you might think; television prefers to focus on the talent and in 1998, no one was as ferociously talented as Ronaldo, whose supernatural mixture of power, pace and skill had made...