Savaged Kingdom

Prada Work Jacket

Soweto Under Surveillance, August 20, 1985. Credit: William Campbell/Sygma

I know this might sound harsh, but that was genuinely one of the biggest managerial disasterclasses I've ever seen. This man called up 4 wingers and 3 strikers, only to bench all of them and start the opening World Cup game with a 5-3-2 that he hadn't used even once during the friendlies. He benched all of his forwards and lined up with 5 defenders and 5 midfielders against Sweden. It gets worse. He played a defensive full-back who is basically a hybrid CB profile like Kounde for example and he played him as a wing-back, used our backup left-back, who arguably didn't even deserve a call-up, as a left centre-back, and after going 2-0 down by halftime, he didn't make a single substitution until the 72nd minute. And when the changes finally came, they somehow made even less sense. He brought on a central midfielder to play wing-back, and a left winger to play on the right, and then took off both of his defensive midfielders for an attacking midfielder and a striker. We literally finished the game with a double pivot made up of two number 10s. I'm serious when I say this is the kind of squad management you wouldn't even see in FIFA Career Mode. We've faced teams like England, Belgium, France, and Spain at World Cups before. We've always been underdogs. Yet somehow, our biggest defeat in World Cup history came against Sweden. That alone should tell you everything you need to know about how badly this game was handled. I know most of you probably don't care about Tunisia's tactical disasters, but I just needed to get this off my chest.

🚨: Neuroscientists discovered something shocking: your brain doesn't care if your thoughts are true... it just believes whatever you think on repeat