RolStoppable said:
I am glad that Argentina won in the end, because France was a no-show for the first 70 minutes and getting into overtime was already way more than they deserved. Argentina got better from game to game in this tournament while France descended on the final stretch; their game against Morocco was already bad, but against Argentina they were so harmless that one had to wonder how they even survived the group phase, if that's their level of play.
Still, the first penalty kick of the game was a situation where I couldn't see a foul even after seeing it ten times. Even more puzzling was that there wasn't even a VAR check that urged the referee on the field to watch the scene again on the monitor.
Argentina's victory means that all six grand football nations of this world have won the title this century and it took only the minimum of six tournaments to achieve it. And yes, I am not counting England because they are only a grand football nation in their own imagination; in their history they've reached only one WC final (won in 1966) and only one Euro final (lost in 2021). That's far too little in 90+ years of WCs and 60 years of Euro tournaments and therefore they belong into the second tier with nations like Portugal, Netherlands and Uruguay. Maybe a bit unfair to Uruguay, but the small nation's most successful period dates way too far back into the past to count them on the same level as the big six. |
I only count 5. Brazil, Italy, Germany, France and Argentina.
You're having a laugh if you're including Spain. England are just as "grand" as they are, possibly the Netherlands too (the Dutch should've even been considered grander prior to 2010), and Uruguay are even more so.
