The Early Final - World Cup 2018

It was a true Final, what else?

France versus Belgium.

Belgium deserved so much more than just a potential third place! While the French are the champions, no questions about that! Except they still have to play one more match to officially take possession - pure formality indeed, obviously neither Croatia nor England could do any harm. What a nightmare scenario, by the way, to even imagine England in the Final...

The game was close, and Belgium could have won, because it is football and fortunes are shaky. Still, France looked more mature.

As for Roberto Martinez, well, bless him for taking Belgium this far, and damn him for not taking Radja Nainggolan to the squad so that they could actually stand a chance of winning the whole thing. This Belgium plus Nainggolan would have been a fierce entity, without Nainggolan all it was is a surprise team that made a lot of noise, earned worldwide admiration, and in the end merely accomplished what all the small nations accomplish - the third place.

Leaving out star players is actually quite common among the idiosyncratic managers, the French in fact had one in recent past, by name Raymond Domenech... we all remember what his coaching amounted to, don't we? On the other hand, Didier Deschamps dropping no less than some dozen of internationally acclaimed players, such as Benzema, Marcial, Poyet, Sakho, Rabiot, and others, don't really seem as idiosyncratic after all once you watch the ones who were included play. Seeing this French team I'm hard-pressed to tell where would you put even just one or two of these extras, leave alone all of them?

Or, wait a moment, maybe Domenech's problem was in fact too many head-swollen stars in the team, not just the dismissal of one? Perhaps that's precisely what Deschamps managed to avoid, and kudos to him for building this brilliant team anyway. As long as Griezmann and Kante are in the game they are unstoppable.

However, what was Roberto Martinez to accomplish by dropping Nainggolan is unclear. Martinez isn't an idiosyncratic type by any means, and it doesn't suit him to act like one. And there definitely was plenty of room in the Belgian midfield to put Nainggolan in - today's game made it even more evident. Martinez is being given a lot of crap for that right now by the Belgian media I imagine, and deservedly so.

On a personal note: I'm still very sympathetic to Martinez, and somehow everyone else seems to be the same way - so he'll be okay, no need to worry.