Simon Bank
This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer’s.
NEW JERSEY. Merci for the spectacle, France. Thanks for the match, Sweden.
Graham Potter went to the World Cup with a dream, he will come home with a football team.
Thank you for 97 days of life.
What did Sebastian Larsson say the other day?
– They have some guys who are okay at football.
They sure have.
When Kylian Mbappé finally – it took longer than was reasonable – slipped right through Sweden’s defense and sent the score 1-0 into the distance, it was a picture that went beyond a match.
The background was New Jersey’s vibrating oven, a couple of thousand Swedish dreamers who welded together memories for life during a few weeks on American soil.
In the fund there was also the French: Didier Deschamps who left his last championship to go home and bury his mother, but who had now returned.
Mbappé rushed straight to his coach, they embraced each other.
A nice moment, in a match that was no longer a match.
Maybe you noticed it, the shift after the liquid break in the middle of the first half?
France had dominated the start of the match, but faced a well-organized Swedish defense. Graham Potter bet on Daniel Svensson and Lucas Bergvall, and received loyal efforts in return. Elliot Stroud and Gabriel Gudmundsson were excellent in their way of helping and relieving each other. 4–4–2, transfers, a team that played defensive football in a way that felt at once unfamiliar and familiar.
But.
But then Adrien Rabiot decided to, for the first time, change the pace. Mbappé had already hit the post, Rabiot had scraped the crossbar with a shot, but now it was time to start making an effort.
Playground with heels and bicycles
Rabiot sprinted, found Mbappé, and a second later Michael Olise bicycle-kicked the ball hard into the post. The return sent Dembélé half a meter outside the open goal.
And here we were now.
Hard grass field transformed into a playground, with merry-go-rounds and heels, with swings and bicycles.
The requirement before the match was never about winning it. It was about not having to regret anything, not feeling like you saved on something, or made stupid decisions.
There was nothing to regret here.
Sweden toiled, they didn’t leave each other alone, they even created a couple of situations that can be kindly called “goal chances”.
Were there any ifs and buts? Any alternative routes for the battalion?
I hear Viktor Gyökeres say that Sweden needed “luck”. He’s right about that. If Alexander Isak had only scored a cheeky free-kick variant then… Elliot Stroud had only managed to shoot the ball through five bodies on a return so…
If only?
If I had just hit 17, 25, 35, 39, 41, 5 and 9 on Friday’s Eurojackpot I would have been a billionaire.
It is art, dance, fantasy
But Sweden functioned as a structure, everyone toiled and many (Gudmundsson, Bergvall, Jacob Widell Zetterström!) were more than approved. Potter opted out of the five-back line in order to, somehow, have some offensive threats left to believe in.
But he faced Les Harlem Globetrotters, from the world’s best talent school.
I’ve been to eight World Cup tournaments, followed four more on TV, and I’ve seen a lot of good football teams. But I have seen few that have this kind of combination of quality and pure aesthetics.
France is… beautiful.
When Olise kicks himself forward and thumps the ball into the back of the chair, when he sticks a ball in front of Barcola (2–0) or one to Mbappé (3–0), it’s not just good.
It is art, dance, imagination that makes one utter sounds of surprise, fascination. Hmm! Look! You sit with an inner Glenn Strömberg who just screams straight out every now and then.
Mbappé played football the entire second half, we could have locked Olise in an elevator with the entire Swedish squad, including naprapats – he would still have come out with the ball in safe custody.
And behind them, an organization with superpowers. A typical situation: after seventeen minutes, Gabriel Gudmundsson starts an attack, Isak passes the ball on to a wrong-turned Viktor Gyökeres. Gyökeres is in the middle of France’s half, there is only Saliba between him and the goal.
Aurélien Tchouaméni is closest, but chooses not to chase home and help. He is deleted from being calm. And that’s it. Saliba fixes a free kick, no danger on the roof.
3-0 to France, it could have ended much worse.
Took over broken trusts
Here’s the thing: There are probably many out in the big world who are a little disappointed by this, that Sweden had nothing more to show than this.
But they don’t understand where we come from.
Graham Potter took over ten million broken trusts and glued a football team together from them in a couple of months. He took them past Ukraine and Poland, he took them to Monterrey and Texas and New York. He brought with him a hundred thousand men from Svea land.
As I write this, Lucas Bergvall has just talked about seeing “the beginning of something big”, Victor Lindelöf has told me that he would like to continue on this journey.
Together
It has been 97 days since Sweden qualified for the WC. 97 days of life and dreams, of hopes and packed arenas, from Monterrey to Malmö.
97 days of a Together.
France will return to this arena on July 19, says Kylian Mbappé now.
Sweden is going home. They have a task ahead of them; to find a more stable basic form, to develop games and relationships that are more advanced than defend-low-and-rely-on-Gyökeres-and-Isak.
That work is both difficult and necessary. But it becomes much easier if you do it together.
The national team
