When a cat has cornered a mouse and appears to be toying with its prey, it isn’t actually being cruel so much as it is planning and practicing all the ways in which it may finally kill it off.
We are, it almost goes without saying, speaking about France at the 2026 World Cup here. Les Bleus have scored at least three goals in their last four games and, each time, looked an awful lot like they might have run the score up further, if only they hadn’t run out of time, energy or interest.
And yet France , extraordinarily, also seem to still be very much working out what they even are at this World Cup. Like the student in art school who plainly has more talent in his pinky toe than the rest of his class can muster in the aggregate, but who is still tinkering with the basics of form and style.
Didier Deschamps’ France are going through a radical transformation before our very eyes.
Read more In his 14 years in charge, Deschamps built rigid and conservative sides, no matter how much talent they teemed with. These dour editions were managed and controlled to within an inch of their lives. They were careful teams, who engineered victories rather than earning them through their guile and their gifts. You can hardly argue with the results. A final at Euro 2016. A World Cup title in 2018. A final lost on penalties four years later.
Deschamps, who lost his mother last week, will step down after this World Cup, but he seems determined to do things differently this time around. In this last gasp of his time in charge, he has suddenly subscribed to a kind of Great Man Theory, but for football. He has turned over control to Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé and, crucially, to Michael Olise, his attacking triumvirate laying waste to everyone they have so far faced.
Those three are working out a system for their entire side on the fly. It turns out Olise is more effective underneath Mbappé, who has finally embraced the lone striker role he long resisted. They have found by trial and error that Jules Koundé is best utilized through underlapping runs from right back. Such has been the French superiority over their opponents at this tournament that the skill and experience gap has more than sufficed to work on some things along the way.
“We have our weapons,” France substitute Malo Gusto said. “We showed that tonight.”
On a New Jersey afternoon when the heat and humidity conspired to feel like 93 degrees F / 34 degrees C at kickoff, France utterly dominated Sweden in a last-32 bout that ended 3-0 but felt far more lopsided. Les Bleus had more gears to go to. They just chose not to. They didn’t have to.
Mbappé delivered his first warning with a disallowed goal in the 20th minute, when he’d been offside by a shoulder. A few dangerous shots from Adrien Rabiot came on either side of Mbappé clanging the end product of a well-worked French attack on the near post.
Olise, blessing us with yet more of his magical oeuvre, cracked a bicycle kick off the near post and Dembélé curled the rebound just wide. Mbappé hopped around in frustration. He’d had enough. It was time for the mouse to die.
More Olise trickery. His shot from outside the box was pushed just wide by goalkeeper Jacob Widell Zetterström. On the ensuing corner Olise and Dembélé flashed the ball to Mbappé. He beat two men and finally curled the ball home. 1-0. He raced into the open arms of Deschamps.
The 53rd minute. An Olise through ball between Gustaf Lagerbielke’s legs and into Bradley Barcola’s path. 2-0.
The French were sometimes untidy in the back, but they also knew they had nothing to fear from Sweden. They could afford to be a little profligate up front, too.
And so, in the 74th minute, Olise played Mbappé through with an immaculately measured ball and put the captain back alongside Lionel Messi atop the tournament’s scoring charts. Not that Mbappé is terribly bothered about that. “We’re going to score more,” he said.
Certainly, France could have. But what for? The cat was fed. Les Bleus have 13 goals in four matches at this World Cup, one fewer than in their entire 2018 campaign.
Mbappé and Olise had earned their curtain calls when they came off in the 85th minute, greeted with grateful hugs from Deschamps. It was Mbappé who had earned man of the match again for his goals. It was Olise who had made it happen.
“Michael is playing top-notch football. When he has the ball, it’s very good,” said Deschamps. “Michael is an introvert. But he’s not an introvert on the field.”
Gusto needed only one word to assess Olise. “Magnifique.”
He may as well have been speaking for the entire team.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now . He teaches at Marist University.
Sources: The Guardian
