All the way but theirreward
the World Cup.
Except that just saw something else go against them: this time that VAR decision, and that Griezmann penalty.
That was really it, though. It wasn’t the last big action of the game, but it was the last time Croatia really looked and believed like they could pull off the impossible.
The Luzhniki was already set up to be the stage for France to become football immortals, and that without a display really befitting the status.
Pogba and Mbappe (right) then at least offered the goals befitting the status. The first did come from a divine Pogba pass, before he finished his own move with that strike. Questions could be asked of Danijel Subasic, but not for the final goal. That was the bow to tie all this up, and the fitting crescendo for Mbappe’s World Cup.
He didn’t this time let fly with a run, but let the ball fly. France emotions were by now soaring too.
There was still one more piece of chaos, as the previously unflappable
Hugo Lloris allowed Mario Mandzukic to tackle him for a goal.
It didn’t matter. Neither did the manner of victory.
As Didier Deschamps would well say, with full conviction, all that matters is the victory itself.
This France have that, and now football immortality. AS the French substitutes exploded onto the pitch, Ivan Perisic was left sitting in his own distant corner, unable to drag himself back up onto his feet.
Perisic had been the decisive player in this ferocious game, but not always in the way he might want. He had turned the game one way, with a brilliant goal, dragging Croatia deservedly equal. Then he turned it back the other, giving away the penalty that put France back ahead just before the break.
Even when the game ran away from his exhausted team, Perisic was putting more into it than anyone else. Never accepting a hiding place just because his body is crying out for a rest. Never stopping performing even when he has nothing left to give.
It was a display that summed up all of Croatia’s best qualities, their bravery, commitment and selflessness. And his decline, as the game got away from him, encapsulated why the game went the way it did.
Because this was a final that was always going to be decided by physical energy. There is not much difference between the teams for experience or quality or motivation. But who could keep going out there the longest, the fastest, at the end of an exhausting tournament, in this humidity cauldron on the outskirts of Moscow.
That was where Croatia lost the game: tired in the first half, exhausted in the second, unable to keep playing their game, to keep resisting. Modric is Croatia’s director, but Perisic is their enforcer.
In a team built around midfield nuance, Perisic is an athlete. He barely looks like a winger, far taller and broader, a weapon for Croatia to use when they get near the box.
He began the game like a man who had given everything he had for his country four days previously against England. His team-mates kept giving him the ball, but he struggled to ever give it back. He lost a 5050 to Benjamin Pavard. He scuffed a cross straight to Raphael Varane. He ran into Kylian Mbappe and skewed the ball out of play. Even this model athlete could not find the energy within himself.
So how do you react? Perisic could have retreated within himself, played a more low-key game. But that is not who Perisic is. He reached deep within himself to drag the game his way. No need for a hiding place.
When a bouncing ball was teed up to him just outside the box, he was face-to-face with
Ngolo Kante, the sharpest defensive midfielder in football. It takes a lot to make Kante look slow, or clumsy, or in any way misguided or negligent in how he patrols his zone, but that is just what Perisic did.
Shifting the ball sharply inside with his right boot, he left Kante glued to the spot, darted to his left and drove it towards goal, skipping off Raphael Varane’s thigh and into the bottom corner. It was the greatest World Cup final goal for a generation.
But having stayed part of the game, Perisic could not opt out of it now. Him and his tired body were locked into it, whatever the consequences. Defending a corner at the back post, just before the break, Perisic did not react quick enough. The ball bounced off his hand, and in any other World Cup but this one he would have gotten away with it. But the France players appealed, Nestor Pitana eventually agreed, and France were back ahead. No hiding place in a final, no hiding place with VAR.
The sad story of the second half was that neither Perisic nor his team-mates had enough left in their legs. But some football matches are so big that they transcends the result itself. That is why the claim that no one remembers second place is such nonsense. There have been some heroic World Cup runners up in the past — Hungary 1954, Holland 1974 — and this Croatian team can take as much pride as either of them.
Modric is already an immortal footballer. But here in this final Perisic made his own case, forcing his tiring body around the pitch, nearly rescuing his own team with a remarkable goal, emptying himself of all physical and mental energy, knowing it would leave him broken at the end. Games like this do not just belong to the winners.