The piano (cont.); World Cup notes

The piano has been moved to the kitchen, its likely resting-place for as long as we live in this house.

Now we must learn to play the thing.

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What follows is highly selective.

Ivory Coast 1, Ecuador 0: An even, chaotic contest decided by an 89th-minute goal. Chaos doesn’t favor Ecuador. Our strength is tidy defending.

Piero Hincapié had trouble marking 19-year-old Yan Diomande. The goal came from an attack down that flank.

Thrice we hit woodwork. Our attacking woes continue. I will say, it’s hard when foulers aren’t penalized. The Ivorians were spared a couple of second yellow cards.

Brazil 1, Morocco 1: Has-been vs. emerging superpower. The same is true of their respective continents. The Moroccans were breathtaking in the first half; having established their superiority, they ceded the initiative. Brazil had a single brilliant moment.

Australia 2, Türkiye 0: The most entertaining game so far.

(Some would choose the Netherlands vs. Japan [2–2].)

I love watching the Turks. They attack at breakneck pace, slickly, all game long. But the Australians defended stoutly and landed two counter-punches.

USA 4, Paraguay 1; Germany 7, Curaçao 1; and Sweden 5, Tunisia 1: Three blowouts that tell little about the winners (and not much more about the Tunisians, who fell apart late but weren’t consistently bad).

Mid-half hydration breaks, twice per game: I am sick of them.

We crash out; the French-born; a movie for the family

Congratulations to the Senegalese, who outplayed and beat us.

The Dutch outplayed and beat the Senegalese.

We outplayed the Dutch but unluckily didn’t beat them. So, we crashed out.

(All three countries outplayed and beat the Qataris by the same number of goals.)

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This four-year-old Vox video is truer than ever. The French talent pool is deep. France supplies the rest of the world with players: especially, the African teams.

This time, France is without some of its top stars; but the reality is, it could field half a dozen decent teams in a single World Cup – teams so competitive that on a good day, a “B” or “C” French team could beat the “A” team. This afternoon, Tunisia, with ten French-born players on its roster, beat France-proper. Tunisia was unlucky not to qualify out of its group.

If Senegal defeats England – which isn’t beyond imagining; it will be a bruising game for the English – Senegal could face France in a quarterfinal. A largely French-born, French-trained team could knock out France.

(Click to enlarge.)

This raises interesting questions for the French constitutional principle of laïcité, which explicitly concerns itself with religious identity but often is interpreted as applying to other forms of identity. “France does not refer to its citizens based on their race, religion or origin. To us there is no hyphenated identity,” the French ambassador to the U.S. famously said after the 2018 World Cup. What, then, to make of French citizens who try to defeat the French team in the name of Senegal or Tunisia? Do they not belong to the French nation? (Legally, they surely do.) Or, by French cultural lights, do they not truly represent those other countries? Do the ambassador’s words imply that the Tunisian team is a cultural sham?

I have no very firm grasp of how the French themselves would answer these questions. (Not that I’d insist that only the French are entitled to decide what it is to be French, even if they are entitled to decide who is French.) But it does seem to me that French national identity has different sorts of conditions than, say, U.S. national identity. This should give pause to identity activists and theorizers. In this era of identity politics, national identity is too often overlooked, or it’s taken for granted as a fixed part of the background. But it is not equally fixed by the same variables everywhere, even if, everywhere, the law helps to fix it; and its significance and function vary from nation to nation.

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Tonight our family took a break from watching murders. Instead, we watched Minions, which, many years ago, was either the first or the second movie that Karin & I saw together in a theater. Samuel walked around repeating Minion-gibberish and catchphrases like “Respect, power, banana!” Daniel, who was still wearing his oversized Ecuador shirt after yesterday’s game, himself looked like a little yellow Minion.

Qualification, which has nearly ended

Africa completed its World Cup qualification cycle. These are the five successful teams: Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia.

In Europe, the Italians were knocked out by the Swedes. This was notable but not surprising. Since 2006, the Italians have underwhelmed.

The Northern Irish lost heartbreakingly against the Swiss. For analysis, I recommend an excellent video – “This Referee is Terrible. Never a Penalty. 12 Man Switzerland Beat Northern Ireland 1-0” – by YouTube user Themadmistake. (Karin told me not to link to this video. It has filthy language.)

The Greeks also failed to qualify, having lost to the Croatians.

Tomorrow, the Republic of Ireland will host Denmark in the culmination of yet another playoff series. And on Wednesday, Australia will host Honduras. In both these series, the initial matches were goalless.

The same was true of Peru’s first match against New Zealand. This series also will be decided on Wednesday, in Lima.

In the first game, in Wellington, the Peruvians were the vastly superior team. A timid team will bring the ball out of its own half by booting it through the air, and a good team will bring the ball upfield by performing a sequence of short passes. But the Peruvians brought the ball out simply by dribbling. The Kiwis were powerless to prevent this.

And yet the game was scoreless because the Kiwis packed all their players in front of their own goal.

Also, both teams were without their best strikers:

(1) The New Zealander Chris Wood, who was injured. He did make a rather terrifying appearance late in the second period.

(2) The Peruvian Paolo Guerrero, who’d tested positive for illicit drug use. As they say in Peru, Hoja de coca no es droga.