By Sam Wallace
The last act of the whole 120 minutes-plus of the World Cup final was Kylian Mbappe cutting past Argentina defenders in that way that leaves opponents with so few options – twitch and you foul him, blink and you miss him. Even Cristian Romero, a reckless man with nothing to lose, tucked his arms behind his back and let Mbappe slide past.
He might have wondered if he would live to regret that moment. Leandro Paredes had already disengaged, twisted the other way by his erstwhile clubmate. The game was flickering past Mbappe in what felt, for those fleeting seconds, like the defining moment. Enzo Fernandez jabbed out a boot and got something on it, and just as Mbappe’s body assumed the shape for the shot, the chance was gone.
Kylian Mbappe starred with a hat-trick in the final.Credit:Getty Images
A reminder that even in the face of a great player, the options are few, but you can always do something. Mbappe had not been in the game and then he was the game.
This was a match of different parts, when the beginning was unrecognisable to the middle, and the end was something else again. Lionel Messi was its great presence, a force that was eventually irresistible. But Mbappe, the World Cup runner-up with a hat-trick to his name, was its finest player.
He skipped the first half, much as the rest of the France team did. For Didier Deschamps, it unfolded as a horrifying mistake which he rectified with two first-half substitutions, and then two more when that did not work well enough. Suddenly, after 70 minutes, France were in the game with a 4-2-4 formation and nothing to lose.
Mbappe has worked best with Antoine Griezmann in the space behind him, Ousmane Dembele on the opposite wing and Olivier Giroud between the wide pair. The four of them have been wonderful, and it was Griezmann who had demolished England and then Morocco. It takes a lifetime in elite soccer to know how to occupy the spaces that Griezmann finds. Dembele offered the right degree of menace. Giroud excelled at the simple labours of his effective game. On this last day, all three of Mbappe’s domestiques had the worst final of their lives.
Mbappe celebrates scoring France’s second goal.Credit:Getty Images
It felt inexplicable. The easiest explanation was that they were ill with the Doha flu rather than to imagine that the nerve had just been lost by a group of three experienced attacking players who have all won a World Cup. Yet, for Mbappe, there was a calmness. The final had passed him by. But he seemed to know there would be a moment when he would catch the wave. And so began just the second World Cup final hat-trick in history.
While the eternal Geoff Hurst took only 90 minutes to score his hat-trick 56 years earlier, Mbappe might say that at least this one featured three goals that were all definitively across the line. There were bigger moments in the game for Mbappe than the execution of his two penalties, and the third in the shootout, but they defined what he was about.
For those penalties, he was facing the best goalkeeper in the competition, a master of the belligerent psychout, a man who would later take the Golden Glove trophy. That is a difficult man to second guess. Mbappe never looked like he would miss against Emiliano Martinez. As for the second goal, it was an outrageous finish, taken first time and sliding forward to meet the flick from Marcel Thuram.
Mbappe seemed not to notice that around him the greats of the French game were playing like they might struggle to make the bench at Guingamp. It did not seem to occur to him that this ghost ship was doomed. He was not even affected by the great story unfolding at the other end, where Messi was summoning everything for the last big push of his career.
Mbappe turns 24 tomorrow. The powerhouse that is 21st century French soccer will surely continue to produce the great talents that will feature alongside him for Les Bleus. With 20 minutes left, Deschamps switched to 4-2-4 and a forward line of Kingsley Coman, Thuram, Mbappe, and Randal Kolo Muani. The two goals made for Mbappe in the space of two minutes reflected the jarring change of direction in the game.
Coman, strong and decisive, put Messi on the floor in the turnover for the second goal. This felt like the true nature of this France team. Confident and young, with Mbappe at its heart. Already the record of four goals in the finals of World Cups belongs to Mbappe. This edition’s Golden Boot winner has scored 12 goals in two World Cups, putting him behind Just Fontaine by one. He is four behind the all-time leader Miroslav Klose, who took four tournaments to accumulate his 16. These are big numbers and a giant place in history, but this was a day when the prodigy learned that the game treats even the greats with indifference.
He dispatched his third penalty past Martinez in the shootout without a second thought. The end was brutal for France. They needed to win this game on the pitch, because from the penalty spot they just could not live with Martinez.
The construction of the stage for the presentation took so long that France’s players disappeared and returned, and Emmanuel Macron had his moment on the pitch with a sombre Mbappe. Such are the obligations of the great footballer. There will, of course, be other presidents of the republic, but France may never have another quite like Mbappe.
The Telegraph, London
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