As someone who is now about a quarter of the way into his seventh decade of life, you would like to think I’ve seen enough during that time to be able to come up with a coherent answer as to what constitutes a strong competition and what makes up a weak one when it comes to football.
You can guarantee that at some time during the first three months of a season someone will describe the division City are competing in as being a weak one this time around. This sort of statement has always prompted the question described in the previous paragraph in me.
For example, the Championship table for 2005/06 shows the league being won at a canter by a Reading side which I would say is generally regarded as the best seen at that level since 2003 – a period which has seen us compete at that level for all but the 2013/14 campaign. A closer look at that table will tell you that all of the important placings that season had been decided before the final round of matches had been played, so Sky would have been desperately basing their final day advertising on which one out of Watford, Preston and Leeds would finish third and earn the right to face Palace in the Play Offs!
By contrast, although we won the title by a healthy margin in 12/13, I don’t think even the most avid Cardiff fan would say we were in the Reading 2006 class – after all, they had just the nineteen points more than us! However, my recollection is that there were all sorts of issues to be decided on the final day of the season five years ago at both ends of the table. What’s most noticeable to me is that, whereas there is a massive sixty eight points between first and last in 05/06, that gap is only forty six points in 12/13 and, once you take off our eight point lead and the ten points adrift of the rest Bristol City were, there was only twenty eight points between Hull in second and Wolves in 23rd – even more amazing relegated Peterborough finished just fourteen points behind Leicester who made the Play Offs.
No one describes 2012/13 as a vintage year for the Championship, but which one was the “strong” league, the one we won or the one with the all conquering Reading side in – I honestly don’t know!
That’s how I feel about the World Cup tournament that has been taking place in Russia for nearly a month now. Even before England’s “heroics”, Russia 2018 had been having a good press with many willing to describe it as one of the best, if not the best, World Cup Finals tournament they’d seen.
I’m in agreement that this has been a good World Cup and, as someone who has watched all of them since 1966, I would rate it in the top three or four I’ve seen and yet I don’t think there has been one team in it that you could call great – this opinion may change though over the next five days because, really speaking, it’s still a little early to make these sort of judgments.
Nevertheless, this is a tournament that has reignited the whole what is a good competition and what is a bad one debate with me, but this time, I feel slightly better equipped to make a judgement on the question that I’ve always struggled to answer.
World Cup 2018 may not have had an outstanding team in it, but, in my opinion, what it has had is a lot of pretty evenly matched sides that have helped to make so many of the games competitive and interesting.
It’s also had VAR which has helped bring about a statistic which argues strongly in favour of 2018 being one of the better World Cups – there has only been one 0-0 draw up until now.
This doesn’t mean that 2018 has been a free scoring tournament, but VAR has helped to ensure that some poor quality matches which would have definitely finished goalless otherwise have ended up 1-0 thanks to penalties which would never have been given before.
There have been dramatic finishes galore with plenty of late goals being scored and when VAR has got involved, this has only added to the sense of drama. There have been some idiotic penalties given for handball through VAR intervention, but, overall, I’d say its influence has been a positive one – it still doesn’t happen often enough, but anything which ensures that defenders get penalised for the wrestling holds we see at corners and free kicks and anything that ensures that diving cheats like Neymar don’t always prosper has to be a good thing.
As to who is going to win it, I’d say that there has been a game in which all four remaining teams have struck me as potential winners. In saying that, Croatia and France were both playing an Argentina side as open as any so called good side I’ve seen in ages to quick counter attacks when they impressed me. As for Belgium, they strike me as the most complete of the remaining sides and their front three were immense against Brazil, with Eden Hazard being truly outstanding in the dying stages of that game.
Belgium also showed a defensive organisation and team spirit against Brazil that I wouldn’t usually associate with them, but, even with all of these things going for them, they still needed the goalkeeping performance of the tournament so far from Courtois and a fair bit of luck to overcome a team which had three times the number of goal attempts and efforts on target that they did.
As for England, I couldn’t believe the start they made in their first game against a Tunisia side rated as the best African team in the world by FIFA. They really should have been four or five nil up in twenty minutes, but subsequent performances showed that Tunisia were extremely flattered by their high FIFA ranking and England’s problems creating chances from open play have sent out a signal that they are not as good as I thought they were during that purple patch in their first game.
Nevertheless, England impressed me against a Swedish side which rather reminds me of the 2017/18 City side under Neil Warnock. They didn’t mind letting the opposition have the ball and, even in their most impressive game, a 3-0 win over Mexico, they were not “easy on the eye”. No, Sweden, like their fellow Scandinavians Denmark, won’t figure among the great entertainers of Russia 2018, but they have had the knack of getting results that you wouldn’t expect them to when you compare the names on their team sheet with those on most of the ones of sides they faced.
I didn’t think England were great against Sweden, but they still managed to completely dominate them in a way that I’ve not seen happen to a Swedish side in ages – England didn’t strike me as potential winners that day, but there’s a momentum growing with them and they are as dangerous as anyone from set pieces (a phase of play which sometimes looks a weakness for their Semi Final opponents, Croatia).
For me, if England go out and try to take on any of the other three remaining sides in a “proper” game of football, they’ll probably lose, but take their relatively easy ninety minutes against Sweden and put it against what Croatia have been through in their last two games against Denmark and Russia and I reckon they’ll make Sunday’s final – I also favour France, following their fairly straightforward win over Uruguay, to be too physically strong for a Belgian side that looked out on their feet (Hazard excepted) in the closing quarter against Brazil.
If it is a France v England final, then a look at the two squads has me favouring les blues, but I remember their supine showing in the Final of Euro 2016 and think that an England side which has not shown any fear so far could do what Portugal did to them two years ago.
Would I pleased to see England win the tournament? Well, I’d be pleased for Gareth Southgate, who has always come across to me a normal and decent bloke. Rightly or wrongly, it strikes me that normal and decent blokes have been conspicuously absent in England squads at recent tournaments, but this lot don’t seem too bad – none of this is enough to make me want them to win though for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the idea of a country with a population of less than 5 million winning the World Cup really appeals to me (yes, I know it’s happened before with Uruguay, but the tournament was not the global event then that it is now), so I’m a Croatia supporter at the moment.
The second reason is the one that’s always there with England – a media which fails to recognise that there are parts of this country (i.e. the UK) which do not feel quite as enthusiastic about the England team as they think we should.
Two years ago, Wales reached the Semi Finals of Euro 2016 and they did so with Rob Phillips (who I like) coming over as completely biased towards them in his radio broadcasting, while ITV Wales ran their own programmes (just as they do in Rugby World Cups) to give a more Welsh slant than you’d get on the main ITV coverage. So, Wales has more than their fair share of biased commentators and coverage, but the difference is that they don’t tend to get heard oand/or watched by the rest of the country.
Contrast that with what you get with the mainstream BBC and ITV (who, I have to admit, were very good towards Wales two years ago) – the main commentators on either channel (Guy Mowbray and the awful Clive Tyldesley) rabbit on to you as if you’re a mate of theirs who is with them at some party or pub which is exclusively limited to England supporters, while nearly all of their colleagues barely ever waste a chance to bring England into the conversation even if the game is between, say, Senegal and Japan.
There has been one glorious exception to this rule however in this tournament. John Champion and Ally McCoist on ITV have been a very pleasant surprise, with the latter, a genuinely funny man, being completely unable to hide his enthusiasm for the game and all of the countries involved in this tournament even if he was minded to. This is in total contrast to the cynical, world weary, views you hear from some others who should realise how lucky they are to be getting paid to commentate on “the beautiful game” at the greatest tournament in the world (no names, no packdrill, but for some reason I’m struggling to get a former Liverpool defender who also played for Preston and Brighton out of my mind at this point!).
I missed the first few minutes of the Russia v Croatia match on Saturday which followed on from the England v Sweden game a couple of hours earlier. Now, Messrs Champion and McCoist may have spent all of that time babbling on about England for all I know, but what I can say for certain is that they didn’t come up in the commentary while I was listening until about the twenty five minute mark when Champion asked the perfectly reasonable question “which one out of these two do you think England would prefer to face in the Semi Final?”.
After that there was the occasional reference to ITV’s exclusive coverage of England’s Semi Final and one or two more mentions for Southgate’s men (we learned that McCoist has supported England that afternoon), but it was as if the two commentators had either made a pre arranged decision to keep the England mentions to a minimum or, as I’d prefer to believe, they realised that, like so many other games in this World Cup, there was a perfectly decent, interesting and entertaining encounter between two good, but not great, sides being played out in front of them which deserved their full attention.
I fear that it will be Tyldesley and Hoddle (a good analyst who loses all perspective when England are involved) on the microphones tomorrow, so that will mean I will be watching with the sound turned down, but I’ll listen if Champion and McCoist are there – heck, I’ll even watch my first ever World Cup Final on ITV if England get there and those two are commentating!
