WORLD CUP ROUNDTABLE

Allen Vinh Nguyen

The obsession with individuals over coaches will never ceases to infuriate me.

Leroy Sane is a terrific footballer. He's got incredible football IQ, pace, technique, and drive. He's energetic and dangerous on and off the ball.

That said, his inclusion into Jogi Löw's German team wouldn't have made a difference in the results. Löw's game plan from the jump wasn't emphasizing any penetrative football, and Sane loves to make these outside in runs that keep things pretty narrow. His choice of bringing Brandt instead of Sane was for natural width, which showed against Sweden when Germany were excellent pressing and moving the ball to stretch the opposition. Their shortcomings against South Korea we're down to the performances of personnel, AND Löw's resistance to start Brandt for natural width.

Individual were pathetic for Germany, the team tactics were wrong, but Sane would not have remedied either of those things. To think that it would have feels super reductive to me, and feels like an easy out for Löw rather than analyzing his team selections (which were even under question during 2014 in the early stages of the tournament). If Mexico continues to make use of the half-space behind the fullbacks, namely, Kimmich, then make a change in the way your team positions itself. If you can't make headway through South Korea defending a low block and narrow, bring in your natural winger.

Maz Wallace

Maybe it's because I'm unemployed and have unrestricted television access, but this year seems genuinely different. It’s the first international tournament where I've watched tons of matches right from the off.  As an England "supporter," the difference could be this year’s national attitude. The intense scrutiny of years past heaped on the players and the manager of previous competitions just isn’t there.

Gareth Southgate, the manager, spoke of the effect that his 1996 World Cup run had on him. In essence: nothing the media can say about him now can possibly outdo the way he was vilified for missing that penalty. I think that composure has passed on to the team. They're playing like there's no pressure on them and I love it. Obviously there are massive overstatements at both extremes. Some say we're going to walk straight into the finals while others somehow insist we got lucky against Panama. Nevertheless the weather here is gorgeous, we BBQin' e’ry day, and maybe, just maybe, this is our year.

Philip Zorba

You know when a player receives a ball in an un-ideal position and for the sake of a well-formed shot they have to sacrifice their balance after the shot? The ball rolls a little too far outside a sprinting player’s path but an attempt must be made at the risk of losing the chance of attack on goal. The player becomes this acrobatic, beautiful mess of limbs in order to put an optimal amount of power behind the ball and finish with a correct follow-through that ultimately places their legs in an awkward, sometimes flamingo-esque, position. And then they play it again in slow-mo, letting us see all the details of the uncanny twisting. Yeah. That’s a fuckin’ look.

Bill Gallagher

Soccer often frustrates my desire for narrative arcs—maybe because my sense of narrative is so influenced by the single-elimination tournament and winner-in-every-game structure that characterizes U.S. sports, regardless whether the process for delivering winners is arbitrary or senseless. In soccer, not every story is satisfying. For every magical Leicester run, there's a Portugal winning the European Championship without even winning a single game in regulation. I don't know for sure if that actually happened, but it's my memory and shows how soccer can exist without any particularly exciting success or failure stories. In that case, the team was just good enough to stumble to the finish line. They got lucky over and over. They played a boring style and were rewarded for it. That's my least favorite thing in sports: when pragmatism gets results. It’s never fun when boring assholes get to walk away with the big prize. This may be the reason why in major tournaments I go for front runners–talented teams like Spain or Brazil that appear thoroughly, historically, visibly better than others. Because even though soccer doesn't require it to win, I really want to see excellence prevail.

But you know what? If enough good teams lose out and enough narratives get ruined, something else happens: the underdog, that team that hasn’t been to the big dance in decades if ever, has a chance to make sports fun again by rewriting their own script. When no one has the right answer, even the boring assholes fall victim to the unpredictable. That's my favorite kind of Sports™.