World Cup column: Kylian Mbappé continues to decide games from the shadows
The logic of top-level professional football is so often informed by reacting to what can be visualised most easily. Taking each game as it comes, focusing on winning your one v one duels and keeping it simple in the first ten minutes are part of the genetic fibre of every wannabe manager across the globe. Not showing support for any cause or issue that goes beyond the strict confines of ‘focusing on football’, is a grim yet predictable extension of this logic.
Watching the greatest players also tends to be a straightforward process. The entirety of a game will flow through the other worldly feet of Lionel Messi. Cristiano Ronaldo will always be a visible presence due to his aura alone. They are not playing to produce brief moments of wonder within a game, the game exists to provide a platform for the fulness of their talent to be displayed.
Despite all of the acclaim and the accolades received, along with those on their way, there is still a sense that Kylian Mbappé can disappear within the confines of a 90 minutes. While Messi is involved in practically every facet of Argentina’s play and Ronaldo’s off-ball histrionics are as noticeable as anything he can now do once he is in possession, for Mbappé, whether it be through immaturity, attitude or an understanding that it does not benefit his skillset, a game of football does not yet revolve around Mbappé in the way it does for so many of the greats.
Mbappé plays in the shadows. He is always present, the fear of what he may do next is constant, but it can often feel as though a game is waiting for him to do something rather than forcing the issue himself.
His impact in France’s Last 16 win against Poland perhaps shows that this is by no means a bad thing. He is now more devastating than anyone when he takes the ball in his stride. Messi, no longer quite capable of scuttling across ponds without making a ripple as he once could, can dictate the pace but he cannot destroy the pattern of a contest with a single carry or burst in the way he once could.
The night should have belonged to Olivier Giroud. The striker appears a better counterbalance for Mbappé both tactically and perhaps in terms of ego than the injured Karim Benzema, and it was therefore fitting that Giroud’s record-breaking 52nd goal for the men’s national team was created by the man who so often benefits from his selflessness. This ability to create goals is a less-heralded element of Mbappé’s skillset, he has 132 career assists to go with 250 goals in just 360 games, but his game-deciding contribution in the second half was the Paris Saint-Germain forward at his terrifying best.
Mbappé created the record-breaking moment, and then, having given his team-mate the record, set about taking it for himself. If Messi’s current attempts to win a first World Cup are dreamlike, Mbappé’s quest for a second title before the age of 24 is the stuff of defender’s nightmares. Aston Villa’s Matty Cash did reasonably well in containing him throughout the first half, only allowing pockets of space to open up for opportunities to cross from wide rather than decide games in central areas.
But for someone so accustomed to the darkness, a glimmer of light is all that is required to prove decisive. Cash, caught upfield in an attack, left more than a crack in the door of the Polish defence in the 77th minute at the Al Thumama Stadium, but how he could have foreseen Giroud’s imperious touch to begin the counter or the emphatic Mbappé finish that soon followed is hard to know.
The game-clinching third goal in the opening seconds of stoppage time was a more accurate reflection of how helpless defenders must feel when Mbappé sees a gap. Maybe Cash could have done more to cut out Marcus Thuram’s pass, perhaps Kamil Glick should have been more alert to the danger once the ball entered his penalty area. But the ferocity of Mbappé’s whipped shot, the most fatal of daggers from the dark, gave no one in the stadium the requisite time to react, let alone an individual on the field of play.
France’s World Cup win in 2018 definitively brought the extent of Mbappé’s talent to light, securing his place at the top table of world football alongside greats past and present. It may well be that he wins a second consecutive title from his natural home in the shadows.
