Arabian winter
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In the second semi-final of the World Cup in Qatar, which will be held on Wednesday, the winners of the previous championship, the French will meet with the main sensation of the tournament – the Moroccan team. She has already knocked out two giants in the playoffs, but it will probably be harder for her to deal with the third than with the national teams of Spain and Portugal. And not only because the owners of the main football title will take into account someone else’s sad experience.
Before this semi-final at the Al Bayt stadium, those who care about its outcome tend, of course, towards football lyrics, and not clear football prose. The lyrics are provoked by the magical, from rags to riches in three weeks, the path of the Moroccan team and the enthusiasm with which – not the whole world, but, it seems, its good half accepted its ascent. Even the coach of the Moroccans Walid Regragi was no exception. Enjoying reaching the quarter-finals after winning against the Portuguese and waiting for the semi-finals against the French, he compared his team with Rocky Balboa, and listing the reasons that lifted her so high, he most often uttered three words that, it seems, adored and not without modest pathos the movie hero performed by Sylvester Stallone from the world of boxing – passion, heart and faith. But prose is also important here. And, by the way, it only complicates the alignment.
The Moroccan case really terribly wants to be considered, first of all, an ideal example of how courage, refusal to submit to fate work great miracles. So more beautiful. So stronger takes for the soul. But you can also look at it from a different angle. The team reached the semi-finals, which is completely different from the classic upstart, who suddenly, out of the blue, performed feats worthy of Hercules. This team, before dealing with the Spaniards and the Portuguese, in the group left behind two winners of the previous world championship – the Croats and the Belgians, that is, it was good from the very start. This team conceded only one goal in five matches played – and that is an own goal in a meeting with the Canadians with a margin of two goals. And the figure does not look surprising, given that the Moroccans allowed only 45 shots on their own goal. For the French, for example, this indicator is only a beat better – despite the fact that their set of opponents was, perhaps, weaker than the Moroccan one.
The Moroccan incident is interesting because behind it there are not only abstract advantages like fortitude and thirst for struggle, but something quite material, tangible. This materiality, as often happens in situations with outsider jumps, is not limited solely to a sense of comradeship, well-established interactions and other collective tricks. If a group of solid football experts right now, spitting on the remaining four matches on the calendar, were instructed to form its symbolic team, several Moroccans would claim to get into its first or at least second squad at once. There are few goalkeepers in this championship that are comparable in reliability to Yassin Bunu. There are few midfielders capable of such a colossal amount of useful work as Sofyan Amrabat and Azzedine Unai. There are few flankers as versatile as Ashraf Hakimi. And even the candidacies of Hakim Ziyech and Sofian Bufal could appeal to someone who appreciates wingers who, in order to implement a common plan, can step on the throat of attacking ambitions and take up defense.
The Moroccan national team, studied from such an angle, is no longer associated with Rocky Balboa pulled out for championship fights, but with a classy fighter who was needlessly neglected because of his specific style. Football triumphs are indeed not often associated with defensive and low-profile play. But they were – performed, for example, by the Italian team. In 2006, at the World Championships in Germany, she got to gold, also surprising more with toughness and tactical mimicry, rather than sophistication – and nothing, in the final she took precedence over the then rather refined French. And in this sense, the Moroccans seem to be almost an ideal replacement for the Italians, who, as you know, were cut off in qualifying for the Qatari championship.
And a person who is accustomed to delve deeply into specifics, into nuances, of course, will add a couple more weights to the Moroccan scales – remembering, say, the crash that sounded on the left side of Theo Hernandez, the flank of the French defense, for almost the entire championship, and in the second half of the quarter-finals – after Bukayo Saka started up – sounded quite loud and almost turned into a disaster for the world champions. They were saved from her by a stubborn penalty Harry Kane. So, the Moroccan right flank is Hakim Ziyech and Ashraf Hakimi: for Hernandez, with his craving for failure, the test is perhaps no easier than English. And Kylian Mbappe will have to deal with a football player who knows his habits inside and out, because with Hakimi they play together for PSG.
But lovers of all sorts of tectonic shifts in the pattern still, apparently, should not go too far with optimism about the Moroccan chances. The obvious trump card of the French team is that now, after the collapse of the Spaniards and the Portuguese, she knows for sure that she is not opposed by a crazy semi-finalist. Moreover, the Spanish and Portuguese teams showed exactly how not to play against the Moroccan national team. And you can’t play with it too monotonously – only a ragged rhythm and a constant change in foci of threat can thoroughly undermine it. And variability is the strong point of the French team. In terms of the variety of offensive options, it probably surpasses any of the participants in the World Cup, and the match with the English team confirmed that even with Mbappe, who has slightly gone into the shadows, there are many effective ones – crosses of Antoine Griezmann shifting sideways, playing ahead of Olivier Giroud, Ousmane Dembele’s passes, connection of Theo Hernandez, long-range shots of Aurélien Chuameni. And this is not a complete list, illustrating the intricacies of the task facing the Moroccans.
Well, there is another factor. The Moroccan national team, breaking into the top four in the world, still has not yet acquired a 100% appearance of an indisputable grandee. In addition to all the advantages, he must have a long bench. Moroccans don’t have a bench like that. With the Portuguese, they survived without Nayef Agerd and Nussair Mazraoui. But after the quarter-finals, due to the injury of captain Romain Saissa, a pivotal defense figure, and the removal of forward Walid Sheddira, who proved himself to be an outstanding “wild card” at the end, the personnel situation became even worse. And if such circumstances turn out to be too much for the Moroccan team, then it really will be nothing more than providence, passion, heart and faith, inexplicable magic.
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