Champion company – Newspaper Kommersant No. 209 (7410) dated 11/11/2022

Group D of the World Cup in Qatar, which opens on November 20, is played by the winner of the previous championship – the French team. She is still incredibly strong, but some personnel problems, which primarily affected the middle line, as well as memories of French misfires at last year’s European Championship and in the recent Nations League draw, including in matches with the Danes, who fell into one quartet with them, along with the Australians and Tunisians.

Surely, to tens of millions of fans around the world, betting on the French, on their second consecutive victory at the World Cup, now seems the most correct and reliable. There are plenty of hints that on December 18, the day of the final of the Qatari tournament, they will again, like in July 2018 at Luzhniki, have to swim in a sea of ​​champagne. Yes, even the quartet at the preliminary stage is almost an exact copy of the set four years ago: the same Danes with Australians, and instead of Peruvians – Tunisians, who, in terms of status, are about the same berry field as the South American middle peasants. But, most importantly, most of the Russian application, most of its most notable heroes – Kylian Mbappe and Antoine Griezmann, Hugo Lloris and Benjamin Pavard, Raphael Varane and Luca Hernandez – are in place. And Karim Benzema, who in 2018 was still in conflict with coach Didier Deschamps, and a number of other great players were added to it.

This bid is so deep and posh that it’s hard to imagine exactly the basic scheme that Deschamps will choose to storm the top of the football hierarchy again.

Integrated into the national team after the World Cup in Russia, Jules Kunde, with his versatility, added options in defense, and in attack they are just a rainforest. Deschamps has in recent months preferred to put forward the newly won Ballon d’Or, Karim Benzema, and Kylian Mbappe, who is sure to win it in the future, with Antoine Griezmann under them. But on paper, the triangle with Benzema on the tip and Mbappe, Griezmann and, say, Ousmane Dembele supporting him, looks no worse. And you can freshen up the situation by injecting speed, judgment, scoring instinct or all of this at once with the help of Kingsley Coman, Christopher Nkunku, Olivier Giroud.

But it’s better not to overdo it with premature enthusiasm about the French, because it’s also easy to see something that prevents you from considering them exactly one hundred percent favorites. Here, for example, personnel problems. Well, yes, the French have them, and quite serious ones. Now they definitely would not be hindered by such a player as Didier Deschamps himself was in his youth, a tenacious, efficient and accurate midfielder. The fact is that the injuries of Ngolo Kante and Paul Pogba, no less important elements of the French championship in 2018 than Mbappe and Griezmann, left a gaping hole in the supporting, key zone, and it will have to be filled by Aurélien Chuameni, rated by Real Madrid in such an amount that you can buy a whole team of the Russian Premier League, but, whatever one may say, the fighter is not yet very mature, experienced.

And it will not be superfluous to look at the results of these amazing Frenchmen in terms of names in tournaments of recent years. At last year’s European Championship, they didn’t emit even a tenth of the brilliance that they had in 2018, and the loss to the Swiss already in the 1/8 finals didn’t look, no matter how wonderful the salvation of the opponents at the end of regular time, was something going on contrary to football justice. And in the League of Nations already this year, the French team played so badly that no tactical experiments can justify its catastrophe: in six meetings – the only victory over the Austrians who did not make it to the World Cup. And the Danes, who found themselves in the “warm-up” tournament in the group with the French, defeated them twice.

There is no doubt that the Danish team in Qatar will pose a threat to anyone who gets in its way, and they have retained the virtues that threw this team in the summer of 2021 right up to the European Championship final. Ahead of the Danes, maybe not so much pure, let’s say, class, which Benzema and Mbappe have in abundance, but diligence, playfulness, toughness, the ability to deploy a lightning-fast counterattack from their penalty area in the presence of such players as Andreas Christensen, Joakim Mehle , Pierre-Emil Hoybjerg, Mikkel Damsgaard, are still on the list of their most powerful trump cards.

Moreover, the thesis that the Danish team in Qatar will be even more dangerous than in the continental championship is relevant. In the end, she moved to his awards without her leader Christian Eriksen, who survived a heart attack in the opening match with the Finns. Surprisingly, Eriksen after him regained not just a football career, but the status of a “big” player for a “big” club. And with his performances at Manchester United this season, he proves that he is ready to hold the conductor’s baton firmly in his hands.

The other two teams from this group are lower grade opponents. In Australia, for example, they recall with laughter how, having led the local national team after the 2018 World Cup, Graham Arnold promised that it would play like Liverpool (of course, not today’s, creaking, but the former one – light, flexible and toothy). Dreams of Liverpool style were quickly forgotten, and it’s clear why.

The Australian national team is now going through a crisis period. She somehow, through suffering in the Asian qualifying zone and threatening to turn into a catastrophe “junctions” with the Peruvians, climbed into the World Cup. There is nothing strange in this. Once upon a time, the Australians were half staffed with players with a good “European” background. At the beginning of this decade, with those who are interested in the clubs of the major leagues, they have a terrible shortage. So Australian fans are forced to consider midfielder Aidin Khrustic as the star of the team, who used to not play all the time for Eintracht, and in the fall of 2022 is trying to succeed at Verona. And in search of a ray of hope for a good outcome of the Qatari campaign, they are forced to listen to Arnold, who promised “Liverpool style”, assures that, although it didn’t work out with him, the “Australian DNA”, whatever one may say, was preserved in this faded combination – by others In other words, the whole calculation is on combativeness.

The Tunisian team, in terms of sonority of surnames, is somewhere on the same shelf with the Australian one. Forwards have more or less solid biographies, but the best of them – Yusef Msakni, Wahbi Khazri – have crossed the 30-year mark and are in decline. On the other hand, the Tunisian national team has sharpened up to build a multi-layered and viscous defense. Best of all, her performance in the matches held this year convinces of this.

Their Tunisians spent a total of damn dozen. In the 13th, at the end of September, however, they were smashed to smithereens – 5: 1 – by the Brazilians. But in the 12 meetings that preceded this one, the Tunisian team conceded only three goals, although it also intersected with quite formidable opponents like the Nigerians.

Alexey Dospekhov