Denmark, France through to last 16

Sports Desk: Well, it had to happen sooner or later. After 12 days of largely entertaining football, plenty of goals and no shortage of incident, the 2018 World Cup finals served up its first stalemate.

Match 37, to give the fixture its official Fifa title, ended goalless and was played out to a soundtrack of whistles and rumblings of discontent.

The headline facts are that Didier Deschamps’ side are through to the knockout stage as group winners, albeit without delivering a performance in any of their three matches to suggest that they are capable of winning the tournament, and Denmark can also look forward to playing in the last 16 for the first time since 2002.

Now for the bad news. There was precious little that anyone else could take from a soporific 90 minutes of football that went down badly with the majority of the 78,011 spectators. The sight of the ball being passed backwards and sideways with more than 10 minutes remaining – Denmark were more guilty than France in that respect – was a step too far for some of the fans, and there were loud boos at the final whistle.

As for France’s performance, it did not seem unreasonable to expect more enterprise from a team that started with Ousmane Dembélé, Antoine Griezmann and Thomas Lemar playing behind Olivier Giroud.

It was a strange occasion full stop, not helped by the fact that neither France, who had already qualified for the last 16, nor Denmark needed to win.

The worry from an early stage was where the goal was going to come from, which perhaps explains why it took only 20 minutes for a Mexican wave to start sweeping through the stands – something that is never good sign in terms of what is happening on the pitch.

Denmark had no reason whatsoever to attack and that was evident in the way they set up, with Andreas Christensen, the Chelsea central defender, deployed as a deep-lying midfielder in a 4-1-4-1 formation. With 11 men behind the ball at times in the first half, Denmark were determined to frustrate France.

Kasper Schmeichel kicked long whenever he had the ball in his hands and Denmark threatened only sporadically. They had come for a draw. Anything else was a bonus.

Source: Agencies
 

risingbd/Dhaka/June 26, 2018/A K Azad