Group uncertainty

The main events of the World Cup in Qatar are still very far away, but it has already managed to stand out in some way. The group stage of the championship in terms of the degree of intrigue and the complexity of the layouts turned out to be actually anomalous.

On Tuesday, November 29, the third and final round of the group stage began at the World Championships in Qatar. But even before its start, the current championship managed to stand out quite noticeably in a long series of major football tournaments. It’s all about the level of intrigue.

It is most correctly measured by the degree of intricacy of the layouts in the quartets just before the final round. The more unresolved issues before him, the better. In this sense, the Qatari championship, apparently, is quite correct to compare with the previous championship, which was hosted by Russia in 2018. In the end, according to the general opinion, it was definitely not boring and predictable, and its results did not at all correspond to the ideas about the balance of power that were in trend before the start.

So, if we confine ourselves to an assessment of the group stage only, then this World Championship in terms of “intriguing capacity” not only surpassed the Russian one, but surpassed it significantly.

The thesis is easy to prove. Whatever parameter you take, in each case or even two ahead of the Qatari championship. In 2018, in the final round, ten vacant trips to the 1/8 finals were played, and as many as six teams played in the rank of their owners (including, by the way, the Russian one). In 2022, only three teams – France, Brazil and Portugal – booked a play-off performance in front of him, and there were a damn dozen vacancies. In 2018, eight teams approached their third matches having lost at least theoretical chances to get into the cup stage. In 2022, there were two of them – Qatari and Canadian, the rest are in business and fighting for something. In 2018, in two groups, after the second round, both play-off participants were determined, that is, the last matches turned, in fact, into friendlies (in one, the Russian team lost 0:3 to the Uruguayans). There were exactly the same number of groups stuffed with mysteries to the top, where no one gave up hope of making it to the playoffs. In 2022, there are no quartets with “dead” intrigue at all, and in six out of eight, all teams without exception retained the opportunity to reach the 1/8 finals. And this is something completely anomalous.

But you can develop the theme, for example, remembering that in 2018, many teams looked like indisputable extras at the group stage, only denoting the battle for the playoffs.

There are practically no extras in Qatar. Without reservations, only the hosts of the World Cup can be attributed to them.

But the Canadians, having found themselves with them in a tiny company who lost their prospects of continuing the championship in knockout matches ahead of schedule, obviously did not pull on extras in the game.

And now there are more “hanging” giants than there were four years ago. In Russia, before the final round, the national teams of Argentina and Germany were on the verge of disaster. The Argentines still got out, but the Germans were kicked out of the championship. In Qatar, history repeated itself with both. But the Belgian and Uruguayan teams were added to the Argentinean and German teams.

And the most important. The group stage of the 2018 World Cup did not give a single real football revelation – some kind of team in which no one saw a favorite, but which suddenly, having got rid of the image of a hopeless middle peasant, gained favorite features. With a stretch, Russians and Croats can be put into this category, but the stretch will be solid: after all, we are talking about the hosts of the tournament, who beat not so dangerous opponents, as well as a team made up of experienced players from top clubs.

Revelations held, perhaps, the Qatari championship has not yet presented. But there are several teams that, not by crazy luck, but by playing for long periods of matches, hinted that they are ready to become them.

These are the Saudis who killed the Argentines, and the Japanese who dealt with the Germans, and the Moroccans who knocked down the Belgians, and the amazingly whole Ecuadorians, and the flashing Iranians, and the prickly Americans.

And it seems that for such a fun championship, those who watch it should be grateful, first of all, to the International Football Federation (FIFA), meaning, however, not so much its activity to equalize forces and increase competition, but the decision to postpone the championship from the summer at the end of the year, leaving the teams to prepare for it a few days after a series of tedious club matches and thus depriving all the carefully designed schemes for their refinement to big tournaments. It seems that this step created an entertaining picture.

Alexey Dospekhov