FIFA U-17 World Cup: Attacking Guineans defeated, deflated

Germany went on to win 3-1 against an impressive Guinea side who couldn’t convert chances into goals.(Source: PTI)

As the defeated Guineans dragged themselves to the team bus, through the mixed zone tunnel, they resembled a bunch of battered young sergeants retreating to their barracks. A couple of them were hobbling, some others were leaning against the support staff. An injured player was in crutches. But it’s not their expended bodies that you first notice, but the sheer dismay on their faces, their eyes welled up and face ruminative. So much so that you feel that they would have flown back home happier if they hadn’t played so energetically.

Coach Souleyamne Camara’s words mirrored their pain bitterly. “Of course, we will take a lot of good memories, and a few painful ones too. We have let our proud nation down, especially at a time when we were rising in football,” he says.

Symbolically, the match against Germany, which they lost 3-1 had the Germans panicking for a majority of the match, puts in perspective their rise, or rather their aspirations, as an African footballing powerhouse.

On the surface, football is booming in the country. The young players, growing up in the strife-torn epicentre of deadly epidemics such as Ebola and AIDS, have a global talisman in Paul Pogba, whose father had relocated to France to pursue his own footballing ambitions, but his brothers still represent Guinea. They have a stream of young players plying in European leagues, and a bevy of young starlets waiting to explode into Europe, but as a footballing nation they’re still making baby steps, capable enough to make an odd upset or two, like when they beat Cameron in a friendly and nosed out Ivory Coast in an African Nations Cup qualifier, but not yet a pedigreed footballing nation.

Souleyamne says it’s not easy growing up in Guinea, one of the richest producers of minerals in the world, but also one of the poorest as well. “We have a lot of problems, Ebola caused us a lot of problems but we managed to rise to the challenge. The success we’ve had is down to the talent of the Guinean players, and it’s not for nothing that we’re known as ‘the Brazil of Africa’,” he had said at the start of the tournament.

Ultra attacking

The comparison is a stretch, but they’ve demonstrated a lot of Brazilian characteristics, like for example their obsession to attack, keep pressing and play a rhythmic, free-flowing football, sans the finesse or refinement of the Brazilians. Often when they attacked, they reverted to an ultra attacking four-forward formation, with even the centre backs nonchalantly surging forward. “I wonder where we would have reached if we had converted at least half of the chances we’d got in the three matches. I have lost count of it, must be easily around 30-40. We had 60 per cent possession for most of the match, yet we couldn’t win,” he reflected.

In this match alone, they had 22 shies, of which only three of them were on target. The attacking trident of Fandje Toure, Doss Saumah and Eihadj Bah often made light weather of the German defence cutting in with pace and slipping through the defenders as if they’re invisible. It was not just blind, wanton runs, but there was a degree of deftness and positional sense too. But the last shot undid all their vision and imagination.

Bah typified this. The right winger winkled past by the burly German defenders with ease — even if surrounded by 3-4 defenders he would manage to find a way past —and would have lot of space and time to shoot. But he would suddenly freeze and then blink. Either he’d flay the shot too early, or he would waste time thinking whether to shoot or pass. This indecision was their worst enemy.