Mbappe forced the own goal with which France won their opening Euro 2024 game.
Gavin Cooney reports from Dusseldorf “KYLIAN MBAPPE”, SAID Kylian Mbappe this week, in the context of France ’s snap election, “is against extreme views and against ideas that divide people.”
Didier Deschamps has set the template of a successful international football side in the last eight years: arrange a series of world class players into a dowdy but functional collective and then give free rein to your best player to go and win games. No international side has ever had such a pathological aversion to the gratuitous. But this is the means of getting ahead when the calendar is colonised by the club game.
They therefore had enough prior knowledge and cohesion to press in the disciplined, effective style of Red Bull’s club teams, whose pressing regularly had Jurgen Klopp in a swoon. With Laimer and Sabitzer – their best players – playing on either flank, Austria successfully stifled France for much of the first half, choking off the central channels and forcing France into hopeful larrups down the wings, where Ousmane Demebele was his characteristically anemic self.
This had the knock-on effect of allowing Mbappe pop up in unfamiliar positions, and it was from one that he played his part in giving France the lead just two minutes after Austria should have had it. Left-back Phillipp Mwene played a dreadful back-pass into his own area to Dembele, and the ball was recycled to Mbappe, surprisingly loitering on the right-hand side. He accelerated and saw his cross comically glanced into his own goal by Maximilian Wober.
But Mbappe continued to be the game’s reference point. Rangnick, in the hope of a goal, turned to yes-he’s-still-playing Marko Arnautovic, who at came on as an ersatz Mbappe. He stood up front but, at 36 years of age, couldn’t press and so Austria began leaking chances.
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