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 its 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.
The headline facts are that Didier Deschamps’ side are through to the knockout stage as group winners, albeit without delivering a performance in any of their three matches to suggest that they are capable of winning the tournament, and Denmark can also look forward to playing in the last 16 for the first time since 2002.
Now for the bad news. There was precious little that anyone else could take from a soporific 90 minutes of football that went down badly with the majority of the 78,011 spectators. The sight of the ball being passed backwards and sideways with more than 10 minutes remaining – Denmark were more guilty than France in that respect – was a step too far for some of the fans, and there were loud boos at the final whistle. As for France’s performance, it did not seem unreasonable to expect more enterprise from a team that started with Ousmane Dembélé, Antoine Griezmann and Thomas Lemar playing behind Olivier Giroud.
It was a strange occasion full stop, not helped by the fact that neither France, who had already qualified for the last 16, nor Denmark needed to win. The worry from an early stage was where the goal was going to come from, which perhaps explains why it took only 20 minutes for a Mexican wave to start sweeping through the stands – something that is never good sign in terms of what is happening on the pitch.
Denmark had no reason whatsoever to attack and that was evident in the way they set up, with Andreas Christensen, the Chelsea central defender, deployed as a deep-lying midfielder in a 4-1-4-1 formation. With 11 men behind the ball at times in the first half, Denmark were determined to frustrate France. Kasper Schmeichel kicked long whenever he had the ball in his hands and Denmark threatened only sporadically. They had come for a draw. Anything else was a bonus.
France could afford to play with much more freedom, yet they rarely clicked in a banal opening 45 minutes. Perhaps the lack of cohesion was understandable in one respect, given that Deschamps made six changes to his team, including leaving out all three players on yellow cards – Paul Pogba, Corentin Tolisso and Blaise Matuidi.
Hugo Lloris was also rested and his absence gave Steve Mandanda a chance to create a little bit of history. At 33 years and 89 days, the former Crystal Palace goalkeeper became the oldest Frenchman to make his debut at the World Cup finals. Mandanda, it would be fair to say, was underemployed for much of the game, although he did dash from his line to smother at the feet of Christian Eriksen in the 31st minute, after Andreas Cornelius had managed to escape on the left wing in a rare Denmark attack. Another save from Eriksen, early in the second half, was far from convincing as Mandanda spilt the Dane’s 30-yard free-kick before gathering it at the second attempt.
From France’s perspective, everything felt flat. Schmeichel made a fairly routine save to claw Giroud’s scooped shot behind early on – the ball may not even have been going in – and Dembélé later curled a looping effort wide, but that was about as much as France created prior to the interval. Griezmann, tearing up the pitch in first-half injury time after Denmark were dragged out of a position following an attacking set-piece, briefly threatened to liven things up only to be cynically brought down by Mathias Jørgensen. The central defender received a yellow card and that was the end of a forgettable first half.
Denmark, perhaps buoyed by the news that Peru were leading against Australia, played with a little more intent after the restart but it was still turgid stuff from both teams. Nabil Fekir, on for Griezmann, did at least bring a goal threat to the game in the closing stages, but his first effort hit the side-netting and his second was repelled by Schmeichel. By that point most people in the stadium had given up on the prospect of seeing a goal.