World Cup Comebacks

With the 2010 World Cup now a slowly fading memory, we continue our series of tournament reviews by looking at the excitement factor. It was a World Cup without a signature ‘classic match’ standing out to be remembered in years to come. Yes, it had it’s fair share of dramatic incidents, memorable moments and some tremendous goals but there was no real thriller of a game to keep us on the edge of our seats throughout the ninety minutes and send us on a roller-coaster of emotions.

This was probably due to the defensive outlook of many teams. It was the norm to approach any game against one of the tournament favourites with a plan to simply defend and frustrate the opposition. Many teams showed little ambition to score themselves. Two defensive midfielders were de rigeur for most coaches and defences were better organised than ever before, with all eleven players usually being well drilled in their defensive duties. These tactics left little scope for beautiful football to flourish and precious little chance of any high scoring games, especially in the opening rounds of the group stage where, more than ever before, teams were simply desperate not to lose.

The winners can usually be relied upon to weigh in with their fair share of goals, but on that front Spain were disappointing. They played neat and tidy passing football, keeping possession effortlessly, but repeatedly failed to find a cutting edge in the final third. Their main goal threat actually came from set pieces, where Puyol and Ramos were dominant in the air, and their tally of 8 goals in 7 games was comfortably the lowest ever for a World Cup winner. Their four knockout phase matches were all won 1-0.

Of the 64 matches at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, only 28 (43.75%) saw both teams find the net. This was probably because most teams that did manage to take the lead immediately became even more defensively minded once they had something to hang on to. Instead of pushing forward in search of more goals to extend their lead, they typically shut up shop and attempted to kill off the game. There were even fewer games where the lead actually changed hands: Greece 2-1 Nigeria, Denmark 2-1 Cameroon, Holland 2-1 Brazil and Germany 3-2 Uruguay were the only 4 matches in which both teams had the lead at some point. It’s a shame that Germany against Uruguay was the Third Place Play-off match because if was arguably the best game of the tournament and the only one in which the lead changed hands twice. Had it been a semi final, it could have been the classic match the tournament needed.

This brings us on to the subject of comebacks, which are surely one of the most exciting football spectacles. Those four matches could be called comebacks but they only involved a team recovering from one goal down. The biggest comeback, and only recovery from two or more goals down in World Cup 2010, was by the USA in their group game against Slovenia. They came back from 2-0 down at half time to draw level and even had a late winner wrongly disallowed. England also fought back from 2-0 down - or they would have done had the referee spotted the ball crossing the line for Frank Lampard’s ‘equaliser’ – in their knockout match against Germany. The goal was disallowed and we were denied the spectacle of only the 29th fight back from two goals down in World Cup history.