I’m an enthusiastic if ill-equipped bettor who tends to lunge awkwardly for odds so long that the player I’ve tipped to score might as well be in the away end with a cast on his leg for all the chance he’s got. It worked for me once; I bet on David Luiz to score for Chelsea when he played for them the first time round, got 25/1 on it and he did, so it’s obviously a winning formula.
My point (and I do have one) is that even the most optimistic, enthusiastic gambler would, prior to kick off, be tempted by the odds of this particular quartet duking it out for a place in the final, but then look at the teams involved and shake their head in a dismissive gesture. Not. Happening.
How wrong we were. Again.
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France? If anything, these guys would be the ones you’d have put there. On paper (and if I could hate myself any more for using that term, I would) their squad is ridiculously talented, Deschamps is desperate to win so he has the honour of raising the World Cup as both player and manager and they’ve won it in recent history.
But as French football correspondent Phillipe Auclair described on a podcast before the big kick off, France weren’t in great form. The relationship between the midfield and strike force was patchy at best, the team hadn’t shown much in the way of unity and after 2010, there’s always the fear they could go postal and start fighting.
After an indifferent group stage, Mbappe turned up, beat Argentina in a thriller and now they’re the favourites to win it. (Not my favourites, but we’ll get to that.)
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Belgium were the official dark horses of the last major tournament, so no one really knew what to do with them when they qualified for 2018. They still had a team sheet to terrify the living hell out of any sensible backline – Marouane Fellaini capable of forcing an ugly result should Hazard, De Bruyne, Mertens and Lukaku fail to conjure a lovely one – but rumours of disquiet with the manager’s methods dogged them up until the opening game and beyond.
With those players, and former World Cup winner Thierry Henry on the backroom staff, Belgium may well have the edge. As well as the most hair.
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Croatia were nowhere near my thoughts before the tournament commenced. They have some super players, it goes without saying, but along with England, they are the major beneficiaries of the tournament favourites’ astonishing capitulations. Many people, including me, have remarked upon how this has been one of the best World Cup’s in living memory, and this is due in no small part to the thrilling results that contributed to the likes of Germany, Argentina, Brazil and Spain flying home early.
This is not to take anything away from either England or Croatia, whoever emerges victorious on Wednesday night. England’s now customary collapse into national mourning has transmuted into something slightly discomfiting by our side’s sudden ability to play and we are genuinely baffled as to how to react to our team’s success. Whether the same is true of Croatia I don’t know (probably not, we English do find cheer in having something to slag off) but both have earned their chance to play for a place in the World Cup final.
You see? Even writing that sentence has sent me into a spiral of confused joy and panic. I may not survive the week.
