Well, it had to happen sooner or later. After 12 days of largely entertaining football, plenty of goals and no shortage of incident, the 2018 World Cup finals served up the first stalemate. Match 37, to give the fixture its official Fifa title, ended goalless and was played out to a soundtrack of whistles and rumblings of discontent, followed by loud boos at the final whistle.
Denmark, through to the World Cup knockout stage for the first time since 2002, were not going to apologise for their part in a soporific evening of football that went down badly with the majority of the 78,011 spectators, especially when the ball started to be passed sideways and backwards with more than 10 minutes remaining.
As far as Åge Hareide and his players are concerned, this was mission accomplished as Denmark collected the point that guaranteed second spot in Group C irrespective of the result in the game between Peru and Australia. Denmark can now look forward to a last-16 tie in Nizhny Novgorod on Sunday, and that was the only thing on the players’ minds when they celebrated in front of their supporters at the end.
Through as group winners, France have also achieved their objective, albeit without delivering a performance in any of their three matches to suggest they are capable of winning the tournament. Even allowing for the fact that Didier Deschamps made six changes here, with one eye on their last‑16 game in Kazan, it did not seem unreasonable to expect more attacking enterprise from a team that started with Ousmane Dembélé, Antoine Griezmann and Thomas Lemar playing behind Olivier Giroud.
Denmark made life difficult by sitting so deep that they had 11 players behind the ball at times – Andreas Christensen, the Chelsea central defender, was deployed as a holding midfielder for another layer of protection – but there was still a worrying lack of imagination and creativity about France’s play.
Nabil Fekir, who came on for Griezmann with 22 minutes remaining, looked more dangerous than anyone else in a France shirt and at least tried to inject some life into proceedings with a couple of efforts on goal. Yet just about everyone else seemed happy to call it a day, safe in the knowledge that both teams were happy with the outcome. “The last 15 minutes was a neutral match,” Deschamps admitted.
It was a strange occasion full stop, not helped by the fact that neither team needed to win, and the worry from an early stage was where the goal was going to come from. Perhaps that explains why it took only 20 minutes for a Mexican wave to start sweeping through the stands – which is never a good sign in terms of what is happening on the pitch.
Come the second half, however, patience was wearing thin inside the stadium because of the painful lack of goalmouth action and the absence of any tempo to the game. Even Deschamps, rubbing a hand over his eyes in the dugout after another banal passage of play petered out, looked fed up as the clock ticked down.
With Hugo Lloris, Paul Pogba and Kylian Mbappé all set to return to the team on Saturday, France will hope to improve, yet it is still hard to know what to expect from Deschamps’s team at this World Cup. The suspicion remains that they are a group of talented individuals rather than a cohesive unit, and it is questionable whether the manager knows his strongest XI.
Reflecting on what he has seen so far, Deschamps said: “Our first match [against Australia] was not quite good enough, the second was much better even if we defended too much in the second part of the game against Peru, and today it was due to the fact that the team had a number of new players. But the reality is it’s quite challenging for everyone. Obviously you can tell me there’s room for improvement, but even teams that are top contenders – Germany, Brazil and Spain – it’s not easy for them.”
As for Denmark, Hareide sounded like a man who felt his gameplan worked to perfection. “We just needed one point, we were up against one of the best teams in the world at counterattacks, so we would have been stupid to open up a lot of space,” he said. “So we stood back and got the result we needed, it was a 0-0 and we’re very pleased with that.” Not everyone felt the same way.