- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
When I was a young lad, I wasn’t the sort who got excited about the World Cup Final. I didn’t care that much for semis, or quarters even, because by that stage of the tournament, the best of it tended to already be over.
Let me explain: in the dim and distant past, before football was on the telly all the time and every game was available to you, we had to live off scraps. In England, where I grew up, that meant Premier League (if your parents had Sky TV) plus Serie A, which was joyously, magically broadcast on free-to-air on Saturday mornings and one midweek Champions League game (if your parents would let you have the TV instead of them watching The Bill)
When the World Cup came around, however, all bets were off. The group stage saturated the airwaves, with three games a day and matches every night, all packed with players you’d never heard of and teams you never saw, perfect for the febrile mind of kids.
The midafternoon 2-2 draw between Italy and Chile in 1998 sticks in the memory (Marcelo Salas scored twice), indelible in my 9-year-old’s memory of that tournament along with keeper Jose Luis Chilavert taking free kicks and Luiz Hernandez’s Aztec-themed jersey.
Later, when the Japan/Korea World Cup came around in 2002, we got early morning football: we had decamped to Ireland for the summer and my uncle bought a new telly to watch it. I was curled into a ball, duvet and all, inside the box the new TV had arrived in for maximum warmth as my club hero, Henrik Larsson, scored twice for Sweden to down Nigeria.
It’s not surprising then that I’ll be your guide to the best games at this year’s Group Stage. I was born to write this.
*If you want to know where all the fixtures can be found, our handy guide is here. All times there and in this article are AEDT.
The Group Stages are more about the stories than the match-ups, because the best of the best tend to be kept apart at this stage. With the hosts destined for Pot A in the draw, however, it means one Pot A team is lurking in Pot B and, ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a Group of Death.
This year’s includes the 2010 champs, Spain, against the 2014 champs, Germany, and has all the elements required to be a classic. Two genuine powerhouses meet in a game where everything will be on the line, especially if either falters in their first round match.
Spain will be fresh off the back of a clash with Costa Rice – theoretically no problems there – but Germany must face Japan, who will be raging that their luck forces them in with two of Europe’s best.
One of the signals that we were in for a cracker in 2014 was when previous winners Spain were spectacularly battered 4-1 by the Netherlands, and that trick was repeated when Germany flamed out in 2018 to South Korea. This might be our best chance at something similar.
Cameron Devlin of Australia in action during the International friendly match between the New Zealand All Whites and Australia Socceroos at Eden Park on September 25, 2022 in Auckland, New Zealand. (Photo by Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)
There’s got to be a Socceroos game in there, and the clash with Tunisia is the obvious place to start. With Game 1 a no-hoper against France and Game 3 against a strong Denmark, Australia will need to win in Game 2 against the Tunisians.
It’s 9pm on a Saturday on what I’m already telling you is going to be a sweltering summer’s evening, the pubs will be packed. The Socceroos haven’t won a game at the World Cup since Brett Holman’s goal in Nelspruit in 2010, and at the very least, they owe us this.
Given the somewhat stodgy manner that both Tunisia and Australia play football, it does have all the hallmarks of the sort of game that millions of skeptical non-football fans watch and then get hugely bored by, but if Graham Arnold’s men win, then who cares?
Get the victory and it sets up a potential qualification tie with Denmark – imagine if they’ve already beaten France and play their reggies – with the next round on the line.
There’s a few reasons you might watch a Group Stage game, and we’ve covered nationalism and star quality. Let’s move onto my motivating factor: novelty appeal.
I say this, because beyond a World Cup group stage, there is very little reason for Mexico to take on Poland at anything, let alone with millions watching around the world, and this is exactly what I’m here for.
Group C, with Argentina, Mexico and Poland – alright, and Saudi Arabia – is very much the hipster group of choce, and the game between the potential second-ranked sides comes first up, adding another layer of pressure to it.
Robert Lewandowski will lead the line for Poland, bonkers Mexican keeper Memo Ochoa will be at the back for his fifth tournament and there’ll be mismatches everywhere. If any game at the Group Stage is going to finish 4-4 and 9-a-side with multiple brawls, this one is it.
Poland and Germany have come through their group, as had been predicted. (AP Photo/Scott Heppell, File)
This is the sleeper hit of the Group Stage. It doesn’t seem like a rivalry game, but it is, and let me tell you why. Serbia is Serbia. Switzerland is Kosovo.
You read that right: Serbia are not allowed to play Kosovo, whom they don’t recognise, or Albania, the ethnic origin of most of the population of Kosovo. The last time they played Albania, someone flew a drone on the field and it descended into a riot.
However, they can play Switzerland and indeed have, at the 2018 World Cup. That day, Switzerland fielded several Kosovans in the team – they were the biggest recepient of refugees in the 1990s Kosovo War – and two of them, Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri, scored.
They celebrated by making a hand gesture known as the Albanian Eagle, which went down about as well as you might think. Oh, and Shaqiri scored in the last minute to win the game 2-1.
So you have geopolitics, personality-driven stories, high drama and extreme skills, all weaved into one. It’s everything you could possibly want at the World Cup – and they’re doing it again. Except this time, it’s also the final game of the group stage and qualification will almost certainly be on the line. Wooft.
That Serbia-Switzerland game is but an amuse bouche of geopolitics, however. Assuming that England win both their games, then qualification and plenty more will be on the table when Iran face off with the United States in the third game of Group B.
These two have form dating back all the way to 1998. Well, beyond that, obviously, but in football terms at least. Iran won that time, 2-1, with all the context in the world at play.
Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran, told his players that they were not even approach the Americans for pre-match handshakes – FIFA did a deal to swap the regular order and the US went to them instead – and then they exchanged roses for peace.
That was about as good as it got for the Americans: they lost 2-1 and bombed out of the tournament. In Tehran, they danced in the streets, the ‘Great Satan’ having been defeated. This time around promises to be a little less charged.
If that’s not enough for you, however, swap to the other channel. At the same time, England and Wales will be duking out a local derby and, if England haven’t won their first two games, they’ll need to get something from their nearest and dearest to be sure of a place in the knockouts.
They met at the start of Euro 2016, with England winning in stoppage time thanks to a goal from Perth Glory legend Daniel Sturridge, and Wales would love nothing more than the chance to land one on England.