Switzerland
Swizzerland2018 World Cup: Swedes vs. Switzerland and the pulling of shorts
There was nothing in any of these classes in Sweden and Switzerland. Switzerland's side focused on Xherdan Shaqiri, a midfield player who aimed the shot at team-mates in the region - always one or two feet and sometimes just a few centimetres from the finish line. The Swedes countered the pianos and crossed the inside of the net, but were always disappointed about the bad finish.
Forty-one minutes into the game, a long passing from the middle of the field to Switzerland was a rewarding occasion for Sweden striker Marcus Berg, but defence counsel Johan Djourou managed to snatch the game. When Djourou turned away, Berg reached for his blank pants to hold him, and the pants stretched like a mini spinaker out of Djourou's waist until Djourou was bottom.
That, my boy and I immediately agree, was the climax of the game so far, and we spend much of the second half of the game looking through Google for video of other short puller events. A typical example is a random foule when drawing a pair of short jackets - an effort to grab the shirt that went wrong. In a 2016 qualifier between Greece and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia striker Edin Dzeko was dismissed for the violation.
Dzeko, on the floor at the foot of Greece defence counsel Sokratis Papastathopoulos, seemed to think that the best way to hamper the pace of the game was to grasp the first foot of Papastathopoulos' short, and then the other, until they were at the ankle of the game. The Spurs defence counsel Jan Vertonghen halted a likely Aston Villa's Nicklas Helenius strike in 2013 by bringing Helenius's short under his knee, uncovering the bottlenecks and causing a misfiring.
In 2016, during a game between Paris Saint-Germain and Bastia, P.S.G. midfielder Marco Verratti dropped a game in the middle of the field by pullin' Axel Ngando down on his shirts; Verratti then said he was targeting Ngando's short because it was less of a danger than walking on his toes. The perhaps most disgraceful fall of short-swelling during this World Cup came from Cristiano Ronaldo, who kept hooking up his short before the free-kick to show his curlingigits.
In the sixtieth minutes, Sweden won the rack with a top-fed Emil Forsberg hit. The Swiss had no answers to Sweden's little queries. At the end of the play, however, my boy and I had given a satisfactory response to our own question: Sometimes the best part of a football session is the character next to you.