The piece of luck that sent dour France
past Belgium and into Euro 2024 quarter-finals
Of course, it wasn’t pretty. Didier Decamps won’t
care. All that matters, the French coach would strenuously argue is that they
got there. That could be said about France’s winning goal and the very 1-0
last-16 win over Belgium it decided.
After 85 minutes of what had perhaps been the worst
football in this tournament – outside, maybe, some of England’s games –
substitute Randal Kilo Mani tried a speculative shot that was mishit off the
ground and deflected off the unfortunate Jan Vertonghen and in.
The game maybe deserved that, but it’s arguable
whether France did. An otherwise sensationally talented squad made their way
into the quarter-finals by dour obduracy rather than any creativity or class.
It may yet take them to ultimate victory, of course, but it doesn’t make much
of it memorable. The most stirring moment of the game was a tackle by Theo
Hernandez on Tannic Carrasco.
It felt like everyone was going to wait for a goal
here. Instead, France got their third of the tournament, but not one has been a
clean effort into the net from open play.
That wasn’t all the fault of Decamps on this
occasion. Belgium’s Italian-German manager Domenici Tedesco seemed intent on
outdoing Decamps in the dourness stakes. It meant his team didn’t do much at
all, leaving so much out there.
Maybe it was a belated realization. In the 2018
World Cup semi-final, against this same manager, Belgium had pressed forward all
game only to get – and produce – nothing from a French defense that refused to
budge. The thinking here seemed to be that maybe France might like a taste of
their own medicine.
The nature of Belgium’s group-stage performance
didn’t help. It was all the worse for the game because it pushed a Decamps team
into a situation in which they didn’t look all that comfortable. They had to
have the ball and take the initiative. That isn’t for want of the players, of
course. France has more than enough talent to build play in the most elaborate
and expressive of ways. Just not under this manager.
Here, it seemed to result in Mapped constantly
running into blind alleys, blocked off by at least two defenders every time.
With so many more Belgian players extending out from there, France’s only
attacking idea was to cut the ball back to the edge of the box for a
speculative shot. This happened repeatedly, the efforts appearing to get worse
every time.
Belgium did have plenty of the latter in De Bruin,
but he didn’t have enough around him. It meant one of the game’s great driving
midfielders, perhaps the best passer in modern football, was largely reduced to
safe balls at the base of midfield. It was telling that Belgium’s best moments
came when De Bruin suddenly broke, once to elegantly link a counterattack, next
with a typically forceful long shot from distance. Mike Malignant was strong.
This is something that shouldn’t be overlooked, as France continues to underwhelm.
They are going to be very hard to beat. They just make actually winning very
hard work, too.
In that, as has been said on these pages before,
they are almost the modern equivalent of Germany in the 1980s and 1990s. They
aren’t a side everyone is rushing to watch but they have the level of resolve
that means they regularly make the latter rounds
They have already gone one better here than in the
last Euros, where they lost to Switzerland in the last 16. That shouldn’t be forgotten
in all the knowing commentary about how Decamps knows how to win tournaments,
either. He’s only lifted one trophy as manager and that despite overseeing
probably the most talented squad of all over a decade.
More pressure should be on. Maybe it illustrates the
limits of this approach. The next round will dictate a lot. France, however,
won’t necessarily be all that interested in dictating play.
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