Belgium mounted one of the greatest comebacks in World Cup history last night.
They were fantastic in the last thirty-five minutes. Until that point they were slow and turgid. They were 2-0 down before they woke up. The last minute winner was hard on Japan but nobody can doubt that the Belgians are a better team and probably deserved to go through.
Watching them in the early part of the game was painfully familiar to all of us who’ve watched Celtic in the last 12 months. We won a domestic treble, and we were clearly the best team in the country, but there were games when we sure as Hell didn’t look like. The slow build up game, as played by the Belgians and ourselves, is awful to watch at times.
And Japan knew exactly how to deal with it.
Their own game was fast, incisive, they got behind Belgium at will. They pressed them. They won the ball in the midfield as slow passes went awry. Teams which have played a high pressing game against us in the last year have been those which got the best results. For ten minutes of that second half last night it looked like Japan were going forward and Belgium were going out. They would have wholly deserved it.
At one point, just before their manager made the changes that turned the game, me and my old man watched in disbelief as a 60 second string of Belgian passes – 12 in total – didn’t take them out of their own half.
Everything was backwards to the side. Everything was slow when what their fans wanted and the team needed was the ball going up the park.
Japan, with inferior footballers, surged into their two goal lead by sucking up pressure and playing lightening football on the break. When Belgium stepped it up last night they blazed through the Japanese defence at will. I’ve seen us change from slow football to that kind of blitzing stuff, and never more efficiently than at Ibrox and Pittodrie last season.
But too often, and especially at home, we sat on the ball and waited. We waited for the opposition to come at us and lose their shape. And when they do that we carve them up like Christmas turkey. When they play with discipline they give us a nightmare.
And it’s awful to watch. It’s boring. And it’s not effective as a strategy. The number of draws we had last season tells the story. Those teams which sat and let us play that dull stuff barely tested our goalie but that wasn’t the point. We scored less goals than the season before because we took too long on the ball at times, and put it backwards when it should have been zipping up the pitch. When we did play fast football no-one could live with us.
I am not suggesting we dump the whole tactical approach overboard; it has brought us unparalleled success in the form of a double treble. It made us invincible. But in the first season teams didn’t know what we were trying to do and kept coming at us. Last season they sat off. We can expect the same next season and we need to find a way of dealing with it.
Had Belgium kept that system going this evening they would not have taken anything from the game and their squad would be heading home. It was only when they unleashed the full strength of their vastly superior squad that we saw the Japanese crumble.
And there’s a lesson in that if we care to learn it. On our day, with our firepower, nobody in Scotland can live with us. The slow build-up is European style football, but it’s why Belgium came close to crashing tonight, why Germany and Spain are already at home and why the Italians and the Dutch didn’t make the finals to begin with.
The teams which have had the greatest success in this competition so far – Uruguay, France, Croatia, Russia – play with attacking verve, with pace and power. The French are probably the best national team in the world right now and play to the strengths of an assortment of talent that is breath-taking. Mbappe might well be the most exciting player on the planet right now; when we played against PSG last season I thought he was magnificent.
And at this moment in time we have three French Under 21’s in our squad, and it’s not for nothing that one is generating major transfer interest, one saw us break our own transfer record and the third has been in Scotland one year but looks a stand-out.
This season, if we change our approach even slightly, no-one will expect it and by the time teams figure us out we’ll have a league lead that’s out of sight. Eight will be secure, nine will be in sight and ten will be tantalisingly within reach.
It’s time to seize the moment and bring back the thunder.