20 November.
Parc des Princes, Paris.
France gave their home supporters one more evening to enjoy before the international window closed and honestly, "enjoyed" is the most accurate verb available.
The final whistle confirmed 8–0 against Andorra.
Worse than Armenia, numerically at least, though calling it worse implies a meaningful comparison between two things that exist in entirely different categories.
Andorra were not a weak version of a real opponent. They were a country of roughly eighty thousand people, most of whom had jobs on weekday mornings, who sent a football team to international fixtures the way a local club might send one to face a top-flight side in a cup knowing how this was almost certainly going to end, and carrying themselves throughout with a dignity that deserved considerably more credit than the scoreline showed.
Against France in this form, against Pogba and Matuidi controlling the tempo from midfield and Julien floating freely across the final third, there was simply nothing to be done.
The result was not a surprise. It was not even, really, an event. It was closer to a training session with an audience.
Deschamps made substitutions freely.
The players who needed minutes got minutes. The players who needed rest got rest.
Somewhere in the second half, one of the younger squad members making only his second international appearance scored his first France goal, and that was probably the most genuinely meaningful thing that happened after the opening twenty minutes.
Eight-nil.
Another clean sheet.
The travelling Andorran fans applauded their players off the pitch at the final whistle, which was exactly the right response to the situation and reflected well on everyone involved.
France had eaten well.
Time to pack up and head home.
The matches that had genuinely absorbed European football's attention that weekend were elsewhere specifically in Stockholm, where the World Cup qualifying play-off second legs were producing the kind of drama that reminded people why they watched this sport in the first place.
Portugal had arrived in Sweden holding a slender one-goal advantage from the first leg, a result built entirely on Ronaldo's away goal.
Ibrahimović's Sweden had home advantage, a hostile crowd, and the kind of desperate necessity that tends to bring out a player's very best.
What followed was one of the most fascinating individual head-to-head duels in recent European qualifying memory.
Ronaldo broke the deadlock first, fifty minutes in, driving onto a through ball with that low-center-of-gravity acceleration and finishing cleanly past the goalkeeper.
Portugal ahead on the night, two up on aggregate.
The away end celebrated; the Swedish crowd absorbed the blow and looked immediately toward Ibrahimović.
He answered.
On sixty-eight minutes, Ibrahimović rose above Bruno Alves, Bruno Alves to power a header into the net.
The Friends Arena erupted.
One-one on the night, aggregate back to two-one.
Three minutes later, Ibrahimović stepped over a free kick twenty-five yards out and bent it into the top corner.
Two-one on the night. Two-two on aggregate.
Sweden level, Portugal's advantage erased, everything was suddenly balanced on a knife's edge.
The game had become the kind of contest where each of the two best players on the pitch seemed to be playing in response to what the other had just done.
Ronaldo waited until the seventy-seventh minute, then made it three-two on aggregate with a finish that required no embellishment, it was calm, clinical, the ball placed where the goalkeeper couldn't reach it.
Two minutes after that, he collected again in a similar position, dragged the keeper off his line with one touch, and slid it underneath him.
Hat-trick.
Portugal 3, Sweden 2 on the night.
Four-two on aggregate.
Sweden were going home.
In the visitor's dressing room afterwards, Ronaldo and his teammates draped themselves in Portuguese flags and stood in the middle of the Stockholm pitch as a group.
In the home dressing room, Ibrahimović who had given everything and still it wasn't enough removed the captain's armband and walked back through the tunnel alone.
Ronaldo had won, brilliantly, on the biggest individual stage available to a club footballer that autumn.
Julien followed the result on his phone as the final minutes ticked down in Stockholm, watching the aggregate scoreline update.
He put the phone down.
Four goals across two legs. A hat-trick in the deciding fixture on hostile soil, away from home, with everything on the line.
Ronaldo had not merely qualified Portugal for the World Cup. He had made an argument, loudly and in public, at the most visible moment available to him that autumn.
Julien understood the significance. Not for himself, the Ballon d'Or was not something he spent energy thinking about, at least not yet but for the man it affected most directly.
Ribéry.
He thought about him with something that was not quite sympathy and not quite pity but lived somewhere between the two in recognition of the unfairness of the situation.
Ribéry had played the best football of his career in 2013. He had won the Champions League, the Bundesliga, the DFB-Pokal. He had been, by almost any objective measure, the best player in Europe across the calendar year.
He had said so himself directly, without softening it, because he believed it and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
And now Ronaldo had just delivered a performance that would live in the memory of everyone who watched it, at exactly the moment when memories were being formed that would shortly translate into votes.
The timing was, in its way, perfect whether by design or by fortune, it almost didn't matter.
'Poor Franck,' Julien thought. Some years the best player wins. Some years the calendar cooperates. And some years you do everything right and the story finds a way to end differently anyway.
That evening, Julien went home.
He ate with the family. He sat in the living room afterwards and let the evening be ordinary in the way that ordinary evenings are when you've been away long enough to notice them. He didn't talk much about the match. They'd been there; they'd seen it.
The goals didn't need replaying in words.
He was back on the road early the next morning. Giroud had texted the last night: early start, I'll drive to yours, we pick up N'Golo on the way
And so, the three of them made the journey back to England together, the street were grey and unremarkable in the dawn.
The international window was over. Club football was waiting.
The last stretch of the year before Christmas, the compressed, relentless fixture pile-up was about to begin.
Julien watched England pass beneath the plane window as they landed and felt, as he often did at moments like this, the life that moved between worlds: the warmth of home was still somewhere in his chest, and the sharpness of what was coming was already beginning to replace it.
With the play-offs complete, the 2014 World Cup's 32 participants were confirmed.
From Europe, the four play-off survivors joining France, Germany, England, and the other direct qualifiers were Portugal, Spain and European champions Greece, and Croatia.
Africa had produced its own drama.
Ghana swept past Egypt across two legs, seven goals to three, advancing with something to spare.
Algeria and Burkina Faso played out a tighter affair, the aggregate finishing was level at three-three, but Algeria advanced on away goals.
From the intercontinental play-offs: Mexico had dismantled New Zealand nine-three over two legs, an outcome that was basically moot by the time the second fixture kicked off.
Uruguay had been similarly decisive against Jordan, five-nil in the tie, booking their place.
Thirty-two teams. Eight groups.
The draw was a month away.
Around the world, the conversation transformed from qualification to prediction, from "will they make it?" to "what happens when they get there?"
Fans of qualified nations planned travel. Fans of eliminated nations, England conspicuously not among them, having made it through their group began, with various degrees of irony, discussing their prospects for 2018.
For France, the question the pundits kept returning to was simple: which group would they land in?
Because wherever they ended up, that group would immediately become the one everyone else was desperate to avoid.
The squad Deschamps had gathered, sharpened through this window and now publicly playing the best collective football they'd produced in years, looked capable of going very deep.
The betting markets had noticed.
Back in England, the football conversation had taken a rather different turn.
While France were dismantling opposition by large margins and generating broadly positive coverage, England's November friendlies had produced the kind of results that send the tabloids into a specific, particular register of outrage, part genuine disappointment, part dramatic performance for an audience that had come to expect the ritual.
Manager Roy Hodgson had managed to guide England to a new low: for the first time in thirty-six years, the national team had lost two consecutive home matches.
Two friendlies. Two defeats.
Chile on one occasion, Germany's under-23s on another or perhaps it was a different opponent, but the result was the same.
The three lions had, in the estimation of most commentators, become something considerably less imposing.
Hodgson's post-match assessment had not helped matters.
"I think this was a magical defeat," he had said, with the bravery like he had run out of better options.
"Clearly we need a higher standard. Every area let us down, our efficiency was clearly inferior to theirs. Our passing, our shooting, our set pieces, all were clearly not at the level required. We paid the price. Without question, they had many world-class players, while we are simply a small team."
'They had many world-class players, while we are simply a small team.'
That sentence spread across the English sports press with the speed and impact of something that was impossible to unsay.
Fans who had been frustrated became furious, absolutely furious. Message boards that had been agitated became volcanic.
The comparison to Neville Chamberlain appeared within hours, advanced by fans who felt that their manager had not merely lost two football matches but had somehow surrendered the national dignity in the post-match press conference.
It fell to the captain, Steven Gerrard, to attempt damage control.
"We are not favorites, and everyone knows that," He said at his own media appearance, with the steady, unsentimental directness that had always been his typical mode.
"But we must carry genuine belief. People should stay optimistic. I know that after we beat Montenegro and Poland last month, expectations rose and these defeats have disappointed people, which is why the criticism is what it is.
But I'm genuinely excited about the World Cup. Because at a World Cup, you are what you are. The results are objective. The players won't be carrying extra burden. Please trust this group. Give us the space to prepare properly. That matters more than people realize."
It was, by any measure, a more composed and credible piece of public management than what his manager had produced the night before.
The room temperature dropped a few degrees.
Whether the words would hold, whether patience and space would actually be extended to a team that had just lost back-to-back home friendlies for the first time in a generation was completely another question.
There was also a quieter story running alongside the public one.
During the international window, several English football journalists had begun circulating a report that Gerrard was seriously considering retiring from international football after the World Cup.
Some versions of the story went further saying that retirement from all football, at club level as well, might not be far behind.
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