Whatever happened to celebrating moments?
Gabriel Gudmundsson was asked what exactly had been wrong with him, and replied, "I don’t want to go into it. It’s better to keep it secret." Which came to my mind when Marcelo Bielsa told the press: "I believe there's a limit in terms of what we need to explain."
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So far this expanded World Cup has given both too much football and not enough. It's almost been a week and we haven't even made it through the first round of games yet. And this bloat of fixtures, happening in the background of Europe's small hours, is too disparate to give us much information.
Are there any themes, any trends developing, any signs of something new coming from this World Cup? We haven't even seen the most tactically intriguing team at the tournament yet, as Thomas Christiansen's Panama don't play until tonight.
Instead we've had game after game after game, each one too different from the last for us to have any sense of what this World Cup is like, yet. I don't even know if a coherent World Cup is possible when it's being held in three countries, two of which are continent-width, and being competed for by 48 teams that are as unevenly matched as an early round of the FA Cup.
If there is a popular new tactic it's booting restarts upfield and out for rugby style possession. 1970 got colour pictures and Brazil, so perhaps each generation gets the World Cup it deserves and this is ours. The last few days have, at least, brought us some netbusters: Mbappe, Messi, Romano Schmid for Austria and Ali Iyad Olwan's equaliser for Jordan, Yasin Ayari for Sweden, Emam Ashour for Egypt. My favourite so far is still Folarin Balogun for the USA against Paraguay, cutting inside a defender in the penalty area, seeing a massive expanse of goal to aim at, and walloping it quite unnecessarily hard into the top corner.
The unifying symbol of the tournament so far is typical of Fifa, who have got everyone complaining about hydration breaks being a Trojan Donkey for quartering up ad sales. Subtlety is not Gianni Infantino's strong point, and nobody is falling for this one. It's giving me one thing to look forward to, though, the first hydration break held while it rains.
Also standing out to me: draws. Some interesting, some not. Cabo Verde's 0-0 draw with Spain was extremely interesting, the competition's first dalliance with romance, lasting as long as it took for their heroic goalkeeper, Vozinha, to lament how visa issues had meant his mother wasn't there to see him. Just when you thought we had new footie images to distract from the sights of footballers being searched outside airport terminals, reality took us right back to passport control.
Images are where we meet Marcelo Bielsa. It has been suggested that his refusal to play along with filming a jovial moving portrait, chucking a dab maybe or waving his hands in the air, was a protest after Uruguay's flight from Mexico was delayed and their players searched like smugglers. Back in 2024, Bielsa did not hold back about the disorganisation he found when the USA hosted the Copa América: "They said the training facilities are perfect, but Bolivia couldn't train and I have pictures to prove that it's all lies," he said of the organisers. "This is a plague of liars."
So I suspect that if Bielsa had something to say he'd say it, although I think he might save it, as he did then, for later in the tournament. And besides, the still portraits in which he also started moodily at the ground were taken on 10th June, days before Aero Mexico got matchday minus one off to a rocky start by sending the wrong plane for his team.
Instead, I think Bielsa meant what he said when some witless reporter waded into the subject at his first post-match press conference: "I don’t have to give any explanation. They took the photo of me the way they did. I’m not a model". He doesn't have to dance just because somebody has made up a reason for him to dance. "We have no obligation to act as role models to satisfy baseless expectations."
That thought means a detour to what an awful time Gabriel Gudmundsson has been having, missing most of Sweden's training through illness. I was hoping it wasn't as bad as Sweden's dramatic press officer was making it sound. "He is still at the hotel. He is still in a bad state," Petra Thorén had announced, without much reassurance. "I’m not the team’s doctor. We don’t go into the health of individual players." But Gabriel, who put the cramp that took him off in the 5-1 win over Tunisia down to his illness, also made it sound terrible. "It was dark," he said. "It was dark days." He was asked what exactly had been wrong with him, and replied, "I don’t want to go into it. It’s better to keep it secret." Which came to my mind when Bielsa told the press: "I believe there's a limit in terms of what we need to explain."
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