Updated 19.00 | Published 18.58
MONTERREY. At the foot of the mountains lies a World Cup victory hidden and buried.
We have to find it, or the fun will be over before it even starts.
Our WC is already decided here and now.
Nothing is like this.
The sun rises over Monterrey, splashing gold color over the green mountains. The day is here now, and the truth lies just beyond the twilight.
A World Cup match – a World Cup premiere – is something completely different from a normal match day.
It smells different, sounds different. It reaches you from a different direction, it demands different things from you, it weighs more.
Are we ready for this, Sweden? Have we learned enough along the way?
Eight years ago, we had built a World Cup dream that reached all the way to Samara, a closed, hard-to-reach Russian space city near the Kazakh border.
Getting there was more or less hopeless. Nevertheless, we were a couple of thousand Swedes who saw us fall against Gareth Southgate and his England on the banks of the Volga River.
Since then we haven’t played the World Cup again, but now here we walk along wide streets below lush mountains and see Monterrey colored blue and yellow.
A lot has happened since the last time.
We have buried the collective 4-4-2 model that carried our football for nearly 50 years. We have attempted our most offensively extremist experiment ever, plunged to our lowest point.
We’ve picked up the rubble as best we can, and now we’re here.
Graham Potter in cowboy hat. Benjamin Nygren with number 10 on his back, and Alexander Bernhardsson as wingback.
You never know where football will take you.
There are more than 900 miles between Stockholm and Monterrey, if you stop in New York, you haven’t even reached the halfway point. The last time we played a championship match so far from home was the bronze medal match in Pasadena in 1994, and then there were only a few hundred Swedes in attendance.
Now approximately 5,000 Swedes have made it here, and that alone is proof of how much we have grown as a football nation since 1994.
It’s just that the world has simultaneously grown around us, that competition has both broadened and hardened.
On the one hand, it should hardly be possible to miss the playoffs in a 48-team tournament, on the other hand, the requirements look pretty damn harsh.
I really believe that Sweden’s WC fate is in practice already decided here and now, that we simply have to win.
A couple of crosses will not be enough to progress, but somewhere we have to find a three-pointer.
And if it’s not buried at the foot of the mountain in Monterrey, I really don’t know where to look.
Three points in a WC premiere. So simple and so difficult.
Since we organized the championship ourselves in 1958, we have succeeded in doing so on only one occasion, and that was when Andreas Granqvist shoveled in a VAR penalty in Nizhny Novgorod last time.
In addition, we haven’t won in seven attempts, but when it comes to World Cup premieres we have a single victory in 68 years, a single victory in 25,000 days.
And it can’t look like that. We can no longer back down into championships, fearfully dipping our toes into the unknown waters as the others make the bomb from the dock.
Overall, the old folk home football served us wonderfully well, but it also contained a risk-minimizing streak that sometimes veered into excessive caution. There was no reason to go home with five men against Trinidad and Tobago, 2006.
It had worked out anyway.
Now we no longer have our security, charter and stability to start from. Graham Potter has had to gather up the remains of a cheat build, accept that it’s just a matter of patching and fixing as best as you can now, even if quite a few tools are missing and some nails are crooked.
A multi-year project has had to be completed in just a few months, and it is clear that it leaks a bit and draws in some.
A more thorough building inspector would have quickly found enough defects and cosmetic flaws to stop this team – but now it’s Tunisia we face. Absolutely no blueberry, but a very ordinary team both individually and collectively.
It doesn’t take feat gold heights to win tonight.
If we just maintain some aggressiveness in the low defense, if we just avoid abandoning the central midfield in the transition game, if only Alexander Isak and Viktor Gyökeres play the game together rather than individually – then this should actually work out.
“Play the game, not the occasion”, says Graham Potter’s football English. Just play the game, don’t get locked in and caught up in how big everything is.
But it’s big, bigger than almost anything else sports can throw in your way.
Five thousand Swedes who emptied their piggy banks several times to come here. A whole nation back home that sets the alarm clock for 3:30 a.m. into the working week.
This is no ordinary match day. This is a WC premiere.
Once in 68 years we have managed to win one. It’s time again now.
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