France has become complacent with itself and barely beats Croatia 1-2

The last matches with France have not been very exciting to me and it is certainly not due to a lack of talent in the squad but maybe a lack of ambition after winning the World Cup in 2018. France's players should be even better right now especially because a lot of young talents have been maturing such as Mbappe and Mendy but the team's performance appears to be getting worse.

Let's remember this team not only won the World Cup in 2018 but they also reached the final in the European Championship in 2016, which they lost against Portugal due to having very bad luck in that match. France has been the best national team in the world for at least 4 years and they have everything in their favor to remain as the best for the next couple of years, at least in Europe. Globally I think Brazil could challenge them but this is a match that will have to wait at least 2 years.

Griezmann had a good match mainly thanks to his cool goal, Mbappe could have easily scored 2 goals but he missed his first opportunity even though the goal line almost empty without the goalkeeper after a cool play with Martial.

In the beginning, France was better than Croatia and they even deserved to score the second goal, but once Mbappe missed his opportunity Croatia begin to react and take the initiative. This continued in the second half of the match and there was even a potential penalty in favor of Croatia that the referee didn't see. Eventually, Croatia managed to score a well-deserved goal after a good play with Modric on the right side of the pitch. Croatia felt as if they had more energy than France despite the fact France's squad is younger.

In the end, France's superior talent was enough to create another goal and defeat Croatia in a match where the French barely deserved a tie. Pogba passed a great goal to Digne minutes after entering the pitch, and after a very precise pass from Digne, Mbappe was able to easily score inside the penalty zone.

It would be hard to say Mbappe had a bad match because he scored but his match up to that point was a very disappointing one. He not only missed an easy goal as I mentioned before but he also lost a lot of balls trying to dribble Croatian players. The contrast between Mbappe's performance with France and Neymar's performance with Brazil couldn't be bigger.

The next match I plan to watch is this Saturday, Real Madrid vs Cadiz. After this, I will probably be watching some Champions League matches next week.

Thanks for reading!