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France vs Switzerland - match report

28 June, 2021

By Robert GregoryPublished 3 years ago 11 min read
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France vs Switzerland - match report
Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

What do you look for in a football match? Different people will give different answers. The causal fan wants to see a close contest, preferably with plenty of goals, with the balance of power swinging back and forth until the very end. The football intellectual with soccer on the cerebrum, perhaps a professional player or coach, will enjoy more than anything a display of supreme individual skill, or an intriguing battle of tactics and strategy – a chess match in which all the pieces have their own personalities. Personality – that’s important. Those with a mind tuned to the personal element will readily the way in which some larger-than-life character can impose his will on the contest. If there be a duel between two such players, all the better. The plucky challenge of an underdog rising to a big occasion adds to the human interest. And the sense of occasion itself is a key element. Sometimes, the context of a match can be as important as its content – perhaps more so. The heightened stakes of a cup-tie or a local derby add to the pre-match anticipation; and during the struggle itself, the death-or-glory desperation of such an occasion strengthens the sensations of every spectator as much as those of the participants.

Any one of these ingredients may make a match “good.” But throw them all in the cooking-pot; tie them together with a dose of confident, competent officiating; and add the flavouring of a passionate, partisan, colourful crowd; and the resultant mixture must surely qualify as “great.” The European Championship eighth-final match between Croatia and Spain, contested earlier the same day, had ticked all the boxes – an eight-goal thriller that had extended into extra time, taking in as many twists as an Anthony Berkeley mystery. Yet scarcely any sooner than the European football fan’s heart rate had recovered from what has surely been the game of the tournament thus far, the national teams of France and Switzerland served up another contender. By the end, anyone who had watched both matches on television might have felt slightly sorry for the fans in the stadium at either. On the one hand, those lucky few fortunate enough to get tickets for either occasion had been served up a sumptuous meal. On the other hand, those in Copenhagen who had been kept behind, or were busy getting home, and those who had been busy getting to the game in Bucharest, had missed out on a veritable football feast whose aftertaste lingered delightfully.

Switzerland’s Vladimir Petkovic won the pre-match guessing game between the two managers – or perhaps it is truer to say that Didier Deschamps lost it. After Lucas Hernandez and Lucas Digne, had gone down with injuries in France’s final first-round match, Deschamps had deployed Adrien Rabiot as an emergency left-half in his usual W-W formation. Rabiot had given a creditable display against Portugal; but with Hernandez and Digne still injured, and with the Swiss expected to stick with the twin-striker system that had served them well in the group stage, Deschamps decided to discard the W-W and copy Switzerland’s M-M. Rabiot and Benjamin Pavard became defensive wingers, expected to take responsibility for their entire flanks in attack and defence, while Clement Lenglet was brought in as a withdrawn centre-half to give the French an extra defender against the big-man-quick-man combination of Seferovic and Embolo. The teams lined up as follows.

France: Lloris; Varane, Kimbembe; Pogba, Lenglet, Kanté; Pavard, Benzema, Griezmann, Mbappé, Rabiot

Switzerland: Sommer; Elvedi, Rodriguez; Freuler, Akanji, Xhaka; Widmer, Seferovic, Shaqiri, Embolo, Zuber

It was clear from the moment the teams were announced that Petkovic had done as expected; but however much sense Deschamps’ tactical tinkering may have made in theory, it soon became apparent that it wasn’t working in practice. Pavard, in particular, failed to make much use of his offensive freedom; and although Pogba’s passing was immaculate, with two perfectly weighted through-balls to Mbappé wasted only by the latter’s failure to stay onside, he was a defensive liability at right-half. Lenglet, the sweeper, failed to add the security he was brought in to provide. All three were involved on the wrong side in the game’s first goal.

After Pogba had been drawn out of position, the Swiss attack advanced and the ball broke to Zuber just outside the French penalty area. With a step-over, the Swiss outside-left held Pavard at bay before sending over a high centre. Lenglet stood statuesque in the penalty area, facing the wrong way, giving Seferovic a free header. Switzerland’s target man leaped, tensed his neck muscles, and powered home a header reminiscent of the classically English striker – a header of which Hurst or Shearer, Dean or Drake, Lawton or Lofthouse, would have been justly proud.

A goal to the good, Switzerland sat back and held her lead more or less solidly until the interval. Pogba probed, Mbappé raided and Griezmann roamed; but the Swiss rearguard held firm. Xhaka, their midfield conductor, was a model of understated efficiency, protecting his backs and prompting enough attacks to keep the pressure manageable.

Deschamps, of course, had seen what everyone else in the stadium had seen; and at half-time, he evidently decided that he had seen enough of the M-M. When the players emerged from the tunnel for the second half, it came as little surprise to see him making a substitution. Kingsley Coman, a tricky winger who plays his club football for Bayern Munich, replaced Lenglet; and as play recommenced, the French, with all five of their most fearsome forwards now on the field, reverted to the formation they know best. The full-back pairing of Varane and Kimpembe, and the midfield of Kanté and Pogba, remained the same; but everything changed around them. Rabiot and Pavard went back to wing-half. Kanté, the perpetual motion machine, thus found himself at centre-half, a single pivot in midfield. Pogba became the link-man at inside-right, feeding a fluid front four of Griezmann, Benzema, Mbappé and Coman.

Slowly, France’s new-look attack began to turn the screws on the Swiss defence. But ten minutes into the second half, she almost found herself another goal in arrears. Zuber, cutting inside from the left wing, was brought down by Pavard on the edge of the penalty area; and after a VAR check, during which the French threatened to score with a counter-attack, it was confirmed that the foul had taken place inside the area. Referee Fernando Rapallini pointed to the spot. Rodriguez, the penalty-kicker, hit his shot weakly, giving Lloris time to dive down to his right and push it away.

The Switzers, seemingly shell-shocked at missing their big chance to double their lead, lost their organisation; and with it, they lost whatever chance they had of keeping their clean sheet. Their lapse lasted only a few minutes, but a few minutes was all it took for their opponents to turn the game around. Straight away, France came roaring back. Pogba, again, played through Mbappé in the inside-left channel, and although Mbappé’s sweep shot curled the wrong side of the far post, the warning signs were there. When clever interplay between Griezmann and Mbappé sent Benzema bearing down on goal, the prodigal striker made no mistake, lifting his shot over the advancing Sommer to level the score. It had been two minutes between the award of a penalty-kick at one end and a goal at the other.

Two minutes later, France scored again, all five forwards participating in a play of breath-taking insouciance and incisiveness. Coman took a throw-in on the left wing, giving the ball to Pogba and getting the return before passing inside to Griezmann. Griezmann instigated another one-two, this time with Mbappé, whose back-heeled flick into his path summed up the stereotypically French arrogance with which his team was now playing. Sommer, the Swiss goalkeeper, came out to narrow the angle, and succeeded in palming Griezmann’s shot away to his left; but Benzema, following up, jumped and nodded the ball into an unguarded net.

Although the Swiss gradually gathered their wits, it seemed that they still couldn’t cope with the French at their brilliant best. The men in blue were in imperious form, showing exactly why they had been named the bookmakers’ favourites before the tournament. Pavard and Rabiot offered more offensively as attacking wing-halves than as withdrawn wing-forwards. Perfectly prompted by Pogba, the four forwards in front of him were exchanging passes and positions at a perplexing pace, and with a wonderful lightness of touch. In the 75th minute, they got the third goal that had appeared inevitable - and. Pogba picked up a loose ball in a central position, roughly twenty-five yards from goal, and curled a banana shot around two defenders and into the upper left-hand corner of the Swiss goal. It was arguably the best goal of the championship, let alone the game; and the midfield maestro was well entitled to enjoy the elaborate victory dance that followed. Yet if he thought he had punched his team’s tickets to the quarter-finals, his celebrations would be proved premature.

Amidst the carnival of creative football, it had hardly registered that Mr Petkovic had made two substitutions two minutes before Pogba’s goal; but both the men he introduced to the fray would soon make their presence felt. Mbabu, a more aggressive outside-right than the departing Widmer, fired an early warning when he fizzed the ball across the French goal, only for the perfectly positioned Varane to intercept and play his way out of danger. With nine minutes left on the clock, he whipped in another delivery, this one high and into the path of Seferovic, who charged between the backs and headed home his second goal of the game. Suddenly, the contest looked a lot more interesting, the question no longer by how many goals France would win but whether she would hold onto her lead at all.

She didn’t. Her players, so self-assured going forward, seemed suicidally so in their attempts to preserve their lead. Gavranovic, Petkovic’s replacement for the tiring Shaqiri, accidentally intercepted a long shot near the corner of the six-yard area. Given time and space to turn and shoot, he poked the ball past Lloris as Varane came sliding in to challenge. His goal was disallowed when he was found to have been offside; but France would not be so lucky a second time. As the clock ticked towards ninety minutes, Pogba was dispossessed in midfield. Xhaka, Switzerland’s primus inter pares, collected the loose ball and looked up once more. Seeing Gavranovic surging through the centre, he threaded a pass through a retreating French defence. Gavranovic gathered the ball smoothly, wrong-footed Kimpembe, and drove a low, right-footed shot inside Lloris’s right-hand goalpost. 3-3, and extra time to play.

Or was it? Almost immediately after rescuing the game, Switzerland almost lost it at the last. In stoppage time, Sissoko, a late substitute for Griezmann, jinked his way past Xhaka on the right wing. He crossed to Coman, who crashed a volley against the crossbar. As Coman held his head in his hands, the whistle blew for the end of normal time. He didn’t let his near miss get to him, however; and in the first period of extra time, it was he who created the best chance to score. Driving down the left, he cut the ball back from the by-line to the inside-right position, where Pavard was bursting forward. Pavard’s half-volley was goal-bound, but Sommer had it covered. The momentum was with the French once more, and remained so in the last fifteen minutes. Another slide-rule pass by Pogba found Mbappé unmarked at inside-left, presenting him with a chance to sweep the ball home; but Mbappé, perhaps remembering his earlier miss in a similar situation, let the ball run on to his weaker left foot and sent his shot skywards. Giroud, substituting for Benzema, leapt unimaginably high and headed towards goal, but Sommer came through with an acrobatic catch to keep the score tied. At the other end, Xhaka had a chance to win the game with a free-kick in the inside-right position. If anyone deserved the glory of a winning goal, it was the Swiss left-half, who had held his team together for two hours; but his kick cleared the crossbar.

And so, to penalties. Switzerland enjoyed the advantage of taking the first kick. The kickers of each team dispatched their first few shots with panache; but as the pressure mounted, and as both teams went down the order of kickers, the goalkeepers seemed to be getting progressively closer to making a save. With the score in the shoot-out at 5-4, Mbappé stepped up needing to score to keep his team in the tournament. The world’s second-most expensive footballer is normally ice-cool under pressure, but this just wasn’t his night. He hit the ball hard, but at a friendly height for the goalkeeper. Sommer got a strong hand to it to send Switzerland through. From a neutral perspective, it was a disappointing end to a far from disappointing game, as penalty-kicking contests often are. Neither team had deserved to lose; but the nature of knockout football, and the lack of provision for replays, meant that somebody had to.

Final Score: France 3 (4) – 3 (5) Switzerland

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About the Creator

Robert Gregory

Directionless nerd with a first class degree in Criminology and Economics and no clear idea of what to do with it.

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