I’ve never really liked soccer. Never played the game, never understood the rules, and still don’t, even though I “coached” my son’s youth soccer team when he was younger. I just listened to what other coaches were yelling at their kids to do and told my kids to do the same thing, but it wasn’t “real” soccer. There were only three or four players per team, and everyone played offense except the goalie.
Nothing at all like a World Cup match. Quite frankly, I’ve always felt that my son’s games were far more exciting than your average World Cup match. After all, each side typically scored four or five goals per game, easily, while in World Cup an entire game can end in a scoreless tie. With far fewer players on my son’s team, the idea was that the best defense was a great offense. Nobody ever passed a ball backward to a defender so they could waste time moving the ball around without any apparent purpose behind it. I was a pretty horrible soccer coach, but the kids seemed to have a lot of fun. At one point, I bought my son a Spiderman goalie’s jersey, but then all of a sudden my goal scorers wanted to play goalie, too. Fun memories. However, those memories never inspired me to learn the game. If given the choice between watching a professional soccer game and watching paint peel, I’d be hard pressed to say which would be less entertaining. About the only thing that could put me to sleep as fast as a soccer match on television is a golf tournament on television, but the difference is, I sort of enjoy golf.
So, in keeping with my personal tradition, I watched none of the World Cup before the final match, and I didn’t intend to watch Argentina play France. But having been sick for the better part of a week and kind of bored on a Sunday morning, I turned on the television and discovered the final match was already in overtime. Way into overtime. The score was 2-2.
They finished that overtime period, switched ends of the field, and played another overtime period, in which each team scored another goal. 3-3.
This was not the sort of soccer game that I’ve grown accustomed to ignoring. There weren’t any long periods where two guys about eighty yards away from being any sort of a scoring threat pass the ball back and forth while everybody else watches. Whenever a team won control of the ball they went on the attack without hesitation. It was almost like seeing my kids playing the game when they were kids.
Fun to watch.
The announcers were saying that the victory for Argentina was a crowning achievement in the career of Lionel Messi, allegedly one of the greatest players who has ever lived, and Messi did NOT disappoint. He scored two goals during regulation play and a third via penalty kick in the final overtime. However, Messi wasn’t even the best player on the field yesterday. That distinction belongs to Kylian Mbappe of France, who scored all three of France’s goals in regulation, plus had a penalty kick in overtime.
Players were on their hands and knees, gasping for air, but Mbappe didn’t even look like he’d broken a sweat after two grueling hours of almost nonstop running. The man is an absolute stud, a man among boys. Not having a team preference going into the game, I found myself pulling for Argentina because France was the defending champions, but then every time Argentina scored and retook the lead, I found myself admiring the sheer will of Mbappe to lift the entire French team on his shoulders and carry them all the way to the penalty kicks. I’m reasonably sure if Mbappe had been able to take all five of those kicks instead of just one, he would have scored five more times. I don’t know everything he did during the first two hours of the game, but when I was watching, the man was in full beast mode.
In fact, Mbappe was so good I’m going to write words I never dreamed would ever say — I’d actually pay money to watch that guy play.
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