It felt inevitable. Too inevitable. The kind of feeling you get watching a favorite get eliminated in slow motion while the commentary keeps insisting it’s still anyone’s game.
France had that game on Tuesday night in Arlington, Texas.
The talent came first. Then the hype. Then the certainty. Every pundit had picked France to win it all. Every preview called this semifinal “the final before the final,” as if the actual final would be some lesser afterthought.
Everyone assumed Mbappé, Dembélé, and Olise would find a way through. That is usually how upsets happen. Not with a shock, but with a slow, methodical strangling that nobody sees coming until the scoreboard says otherwise.
The hype versus the scoreline
The core promise of this France side was firepower. Mbappé and Dembélé had combined for more than a dozen goals across the tournament. That was the justification for the favoritism, the justification for calling this the real final.
Then Spain showed up and played defense like it owed someone money.
Spain has only allowed one goal this World Cup, and hasn’t been beaten in two years, a run of 37 games. I’ve covered enough tournaments to know that stat alone should have been a warning sign. Nobody wanted to believe a defense could out-muscle that much attacking talent. I didn’t fully believe it either, aka I picked France in my bracket like everyone else.
What actually happened
Mikel Oyarzabal opened the scoring from the penalty spot in the 22nd minute, and Pedro Porro doubled the lead in the 58th. The penalty didn’t come from nowhere. Lamine Yamal drew the foul that led to the spot kick, and that’s the part worth sitting with for a second.
Yamal is eighteen. He was the one creating danger in a half where most of the noise, understandably, was pointed the other way. He nearly added a third himself, curling in a close-range effort that was chalked off for offside. It wasn’t a decisive goal. It wasn’t even a goal at all. But it was the kind of moment that tells you who a team actually leans on when things get tight.
Porro’s goal, the one that put the game away, came from something almost cruel in its simplicity. A give-and-go with Dani Olmo exposed a French defensive lapse, and just like that, the game everyone had billed as too close to call wasn’t close at all.
France finished with ten shots and just three on target, and Spain’s defense stifled Mbappé, Dembélé, and Olise for the entire ninety minutes. You can have all the talent in the world. It doesn’t matter if there’s no space to use it.
Sixteen years is a long time
Spain’s only other World Cup final appearance came in 2010, when they won the whole thing. Sixteen years is a long time to carry that weight around, to be the team everyone respects but nobody quite fears the way they fear Brazil or Argentina.
That changes now, or at least it should.
Spain will face the winner of Wednesday’s semifinal between Argentina and England in Sunday’s final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. I’ll be honest, I don’t know yet which side gives Spain the tougher test. Messi’s Argentina chasing history, aka back-to-back titles nobody’s managed since Brazil in the early 1960s. Or England, still hunting for a first title since 1966, still carrying that particular flavor of hope-turned-heartbreak into every tournament.
Either way, Spain earned the right to find out.
The part nobody predicted
France was chasing something historic of its own, a shot at becoming the first team to reach three straight World Cup finals. That story is over now, at least for this cycle. Deschamps has one game left in charge, a third-place match on Saturday, which is its own kind of strange ending for a manager who’s taken this team as far as anyone could ask.
I keep coming back to that Belgium result from the quarterfinals, the only time anyone’s actually breached this Spain defense all tournament. One goal in seven matches. That’s not a hot streak. That’s a system. And systems, unlike moments of individual brilliance, tend to hold up when the stakes get higher, not lower.
Whether that holds against Argentina or England, we don’t know yet. Whether Yamal keeps being the difference-maker at eighteen years old in the biggest games of his life, we don’t know that either.
We’ll find out Sunday.
You May Also Read:
