Uruguay v France - France Sees Out Uruguay and Heads to World Cup Semifinals - 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia - Match 57
France’s players and coaches had spent the buildup to the team’s World Cup quarterfinal against Uruguay talking up their opponent’s defensive capabilities.
And statistics bore out the wariness with which the French approached the game: Uruguay’s goal had been breached just once in 2018, and not by a France team for five consecutive games, a run stretching to 1985.
Yet by the end of a poor game played at Nizhny Novgorod Stadium, those concerns appeared misplaced. Uruguay’s gnarled back line, which had built its reputation on years of repelling some of soccer’s most potent attacks, gifted Didier Deschamps’s team safe passage into a semifinal in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Tuesday, conceding two soft goals in a 2-0 defeat.
Raphael Varane, France’s central defender, opened the scoring in the first half after easily losing his marker, MatÃas Vecino, to plant a header off Antoine Griezmann’s free kick beyond goalkeeper Fernando Muslera. Worse was to follow.
Muslera, among a group of Uruguayan players appearing in their third World Cup, made a hash of saving a routine shot from Griezmann, and fumbled the ball into his own net. With that, Uruguay’s stay in Russia was effectively over, and the game petered out to its inevitable conclusion.
“I told all my players after the match that they can be very proud, keep their heads high,” said Óscar Tabárez, the 71-year-old coach who has transformed Uruguay’s soccer fortunes since taking charge of the team 12 years ago. “I don’t have anything bad to say against them. We all saw that it was not a very common goal, but Muslera has been a very important pillar in all our work up until now.”
In reality, France did not need to play particularly well to overcome a second South American team in the knockout stages. It didn’t, for example, require Kylian Mbappé, its 19-year-old attacking phenom, to show anywhere near the threat he did in the swashbuckling 4-3 victory over Argentina in the round of 16.
A subdued performance from Mbappé was in keeping with a generally low-key game that was played at times in an eerily quiet atmosphere that did nor reflect the prize on offer to the victor.
It was perhaps apt that it was Griezmann who did as much as any other player on the field to liven the proceedings.
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