“KYLIAN MBAPPE”, SAID Kylian Mbappe this week, in the context of France’s snap election, “is against extreme views and against ideas that divide people.”
Tonight Mbappe showed that his vision of France is not one he shares for its national team. Les Bleus are no Republic: no, this is another French monarchy from which the king is actually safe from a beheading.
This is Kylian’s team, and he continues to decide games even on his poorer days. It was his cross that forced the mildly comic own goal from which France took the lead and his jaw-dropping second-half miss was then rendered irrelevant by the fact Austria, a doughty, diligent collective, lacked any kind of commensurate quality.
Didier Deschamps has set the template of a successful international football side in the last eight years: arrange a series of world class players into a dowdy but functional collective and then give free rein to your best player to go and win games. No international side has ever had such a pathological aversion to the gratuitous. But this is the means of getting ahead when the calendar is colonised by the club game. Preparing for an international tournament is the equivalent of cramming for an exam.
Ralf Rangnick’s Austria, however, are this tournament’s closest thing to a club side. Uefa’s strict commercial policing is what presumably robbed them of their full name, Red Bull Österreich.
This is international football, fuelled by Red Bull. Rangnick is a former sporting director of Red Bull’s highest-profile club sides, Salzburg and Leipzig, while five of his starting outfield players have played for at least one of those clubs. (Three of those players – Marcel Sabitzer, Konrad Laimer, and Nicolas Seiwald – have played for both.)
They therefore had enough prior knowledge and cohesion to press in the disciplined, effective style of Red Bull’s club teams, whose pressing regularly had Jurgen Klopp in a swoon. With Laimer and Sabitzer – their best players – playing on either flank, Austria successfully stifled France for much of the first half, choking off the central channels and forcing France into hopeful larrups down the wings, where Ousmane Demebele was his characteristically anemic self.
In possession, Sabitzer and Laimer folded in-field, and it was through a choreographed move that Austria should have taken a first-half lead. Sabitzer sprinted in field to drag Jules Kounde away from the right-back, creating space for Michael Gregoritsch to swing a left cross into the box that Sabitzer cushioned softly for Christoph Baumgartner, whose shot was saved brilliantly by a splayed Mike Maignan.
Rangnick’s side cannot carry any passengers, but France are structured to give Kylian Mbappe an armchair ride. Typically they are defensively vulnerable down Mbappe’s flank, given his exquisite disinterest in any kind of defensive work. He started off the left tonight, but when Austria had the ball, Mbappe swapped with Marcus Thuram, who was expected to do the defensive work his captain so hilariously dismisses.
This had the knock-on effect of allowing Mbappe pop up in unfamiliar positions, and it was from one that he played his part in giving France the lead just two minutes after Austria should have had it. Left-back Phillipp Mwene played a dreadful back-pass into his own area to Dembele, and the ball was recycled to Mbappe, surprisingly loitering on the right-hand side. He accelerated and saw his cross comically glanced into his own goal by Maximilian Wober.
It was a goal to reflect the essential unfairness of life. Here were the furrowed-browed and conscientious hard-workers undone by the guy blithely and frictionlessly making his way through life; Austria playing Frank Grimes to Kylian’s Homer.
Not that Mbappe had it all his own way. Now seemingly permanently playing through the middle, Mbappe ran onto a long ball by Rabiot early in the second half, took a superb touch to take the ball away from one defender before his awesome acceleration took him away from a second to set up a one-on-one with the Austrian goalkeeper. That he then curled the ball wide of the post was one of the most shocking events of these Euros so far.
But Mbappe continued to be the game’s reference point. Rangnick, in the hope of a goal, turned to yes-he’s-still-playing Marko Arnautovic, who at came on as an ersatz Mbappe. He stood up front but, at 36 years of age, couldn’t press and so Austria began leaking chances.
France couldn’t find a second goal, though, with Thuram doing a poor Mbappe impression at one point by cutting in from the left, doing a couple of stepovers with all the dynamism of a farmer hurdling a gate, and then skewed a lame shot into the crowd.
Mbappe’s best moments came when he floated out to the left, and this is the only tension left for Deschamps to resolve: how to balance his most effective position with its trade-off defensive vulnerability?
Mbappe left the field bloodied, having smashed his nose into an Austrian shoulder in trying to attack the free-kick he won with much tamer contact. He left the pitch groggily from behind the goal, but the referee resumed without allowing him to be replaced. As Deschamps erupted in fury and the French bench gesticulated madly, Mbappe looked around, strolled onto the pitch, and sat down to force an interruption.
He took a booking and the ear-splitting whistles of the Austrian support as he walked down the tunnel. Who says he’s not a team player?
