Support truly
independent journalism
“If you're getting bored, watch another game.” It was Didier Deschamps’s challenge to his critics. It promised to be the prelude to another exercise in Deschampsball, shutting a game down with a bank of defensive midfielders and a formidable rearguard. And yet what followed was so exciting that the France manager may have sought to divert his attention to something drearier.
Because there was a downside to entertainment. For France, anyway. Perhaps the pragmatist in Deschamps feared as much. Les Bleus had plotted a unique path to the last four, when none of their players scored in open play but neither did they concede in it. Then waits ended; at either end, it transpired.
The French drought had lasted 488 minutes, until they scored a goal of such seeming simplicity to make it seem stranger still that it had lasted so long; Kylian Mbappe, possibly the world’s best player, chipped a cross to the far post and Randal Kolo Muani, an €80m striker, headed in.
But the French resistance had spanned 501 minutes, from the start of their opener against Austria, until the moment Lamine Yamal collected possession about 30 yards from their goal. At which point another comment from this week aged particularly badly. “To reach a final of the Euros, he needs to do more than he has done by now,” Adrien Rabiot had said. And so Yamal jinked to fashion room to shoot. A France midfielder – a certain Adrien Rabiot – afforded him too much room. What followed was exquisite: a 25-yard shot curled in off the far post, making the Yamal the youngest man – or boy – to score in a European Championships.
After 500 minutes, when France were breached only by a twice-taken Robert Lewandowski penalty, they conceded two in five minutes; if this is excitement, Deschamps would choose tedium any time. The misdirected cross from Jesus Navas – an oddly profitable tactic over the years – was followed by the juggling brilliance of the catalytic Dani Olmo, befuddling Aurelien Tchouameni, and the final touch off Jules Kounde.
The French defence had seemed as impenetrable as the Bastille, but Deschamps’s Bastille was stormed: by the young and the audacious. Mike Maignan has been magnificent; if it took something spectacular to defeat him, France’s unexpected loss of control was highlighted by the sight of the goalkeeper hurtling out of his box to slide-tackle Nico Williams; very well, it transpired, but such last-ditch interventions had not been required.
Still, France were stretched: by pace, by width, by raw talent. Spain could bypass the wall of defensive midfielders by seeking to isolate their wingers against the French full-backs. Kounde and Theo Hernandez have had terrific tournaments but they met their match in Williams and Yamal.
Olmo, who may belong to the genre of player who is better at international football than the club game, has an elusiveness that meant he could evade Deschamps’s triple-shield in midfield. The feeling was that France would impose their game on Spain; instead the opposite applied. Luis de la Fuente’s entertainers set the tone. For France, there were disconcerting amounts of things happening. This was not in their script.
These are teams with different concepts of control. Spain’s, a throwback to the tiki-taka era, was shown when they had a lead, when they could pass the ball. France prefer to exercise it with bodies behind the ball. It is scarcely a strategy for trailing, but then Deschamps’s side had not been behind all tournament. The impression was that they could rely on clean sheets forever – until, suddenly, they couldn’t. It might have supplied some justification of Deschamps’s cautiousness; when Spain could unleash anarchy, if only for five minutes, France went out.
And, while he has leant into his image, Deschamps is not the dullard of caricature. His France have ended up this way because of circumstances. He had a bank of defensive midfielders, but no forwards who found peak form in Euro 2024. He was smart enough to recognise he could improve his defence by abandoning his reservations about William Saliba.
His methodology has never actually been to win every game 1-0, or on penalties after a 0-0 draw. His France have been involved in their fair share of classic knockout ties. They have won some – 4-3 against Argentina and 4-2 against Croatia in the 2018 World Cup – and lost others, the 3-3 draws with Switzerland in Euro 2020 and Argentina in the last World Cup, both on spot kicks.
But those mixed returns show that allowing for excitement is a risky blueprint. Better to reduce it. Instead, a match that flew by – it seemed about a quarter of the length of France’s quarter-final with Portugal – escaped from Deschamps’s grasp. And with it, perhaps, his last chance to complete the double-double, of World Cup and European Championships as captain and manager.
He ended with hands in pockets, back turned from the pitch; not alienated by the entertainment as much as disappointed by the defeat. There is another game to watch, in Berlin on Sunday, but it will not involve France. And if Spain get their way, it probably won’t be boring.
