Football finds a way as bloated, break-addled World Cup continues to deliver great drama

This whole World Cup appears to be an exercise in showing how football, even when it’s bad, is still good.

Panama and Ghana both knew – certainly after if not already before England’s earlier clash with Croatia – that this was a must-win game if either of them had serious ambitions to remain in the competition beyond their initial Group L commitments.

Everything we saw in both games suggests that, with the very best will in the world, further points are unlikely for either of these teams. Panama are much improved on the 2018 vintage swept aside by Belgium, Tunisia and most memorably Harry Kane and England. The problem they have there is that so too are Harry Kane and England.

And Ghana now are simply miles away from the teams of Essien and Asamoah Gyan and Appiah and Muntari and Mensah that made such waves at the 2006 and 2010 tournaments. They didn’t even qualify for the most recent AFCON, and it is painfully easy to see why.

This was a nervy, cagey game between two sides torn between knowing only a win would preserve serious chances of progression even in this safety-net-riddled tournament and knowing that going home without a point at all was the likely fate for the loser.

It led to lengthy periods of extreme caginess but a game that burst to life in the closing stages as both sides belatedly chased that winner.

It was Ghana who got it, in the most dramatic style, deep into added time but not so deep that there wasn’t still time for Panama to come close to an equaliser after sending their goalkeeper up for a free-kick.

Yet it wasn’t to be and for Panama the wait for a first World Cup point goes on. And is unlikely now to end at this tournament. Ghana now find themselves in the Scottish Position after a 1-0 win against their weakest opponent. Avoid humiliation against the group heavyweights to come, and it might well be enough.

It was always going to be a challenge in every way for this game to follow the game of the tournament so far between the two big names in this group. It could never really hope to do so, and did not do so. But it wasn’t helped by the most maddening intrusion on football’s traditions and the most egregious example yet seen at this tournament.

It really would just be better if FIFA and the World Cup organisers ceased insulting everyone’s collected intelligence and just called the Hydration Break what it is. The cowardly euphemistic label and decision to pointlessly keep the clock running to try and make it look like they haven’t done what we can all see they’ve done is just embarrassing.

If you’re going to do something as fundamental as turn the game into quarters, then at least have the guts to do so with your whole chest. People aren’t stupid. Nobody has been fooled by the player welfare angle suggested by Hydration Breaks.

We must admit to a grudging respect for the sheer lack of f*cks it takes to pretend you’re concerned about player welfare at all in a tournament packed with more games than ever before on the back of a season packed with more games than ever before. But never forget that it’s all from a place of craven, miserable cowardice.

The growing and increasingly audible backlash to the breaks inside the stadia is encouraging and, you’d like to think, causing a few FIFA-suited bums to shift uncomfortably in their padded seats. But that is to assume they remain capable of feeling human emotions like embarrassment or shame.

The Hydration Breaks were met with widespread boos during England’s win over Croatia, and drew an even more hostile response here.

The fact it was quite chilly and absolutely p*ssing it down in Ontario might have been a factor.

The players here did at least go through the pantomime of taking on drinks, although we do wonder if those Powerade bottles were in fact full of lovely, steaming Bovril. Which would, in fairness, change our whole opinion on the breaks altogether.

Portugal had earlier rather given the game away by taking on no fluids at all, cold or otherwise, in their second-half break as Roberto Martinez desperately tried and failed to coax some kind of performance out of an excellent but misfiring team.

But we don’t think we’ve been more irritated by the break than we were in the second half of this one.

It had taken a while, but this was a game that had just started to come tentatively but undeniably to life, with both teams knowing deep down that realistically only a win here would do, when all that was lost for a break that had no reason to exist beyond the craven decision to allow one of the most fundamental founding principles of football, that what we have is a game of two halves, to be lost.

And yet, football found a way. In the least encouraging conditions imaginable and after 90 often painful minutes of inaction, this magnificent sport delivered yet again.

No wonder the suits love it so much. Football is such a brilliant game it is all but immune to their nonsense. But that doesn’t mean any of us should ever stop fighting back against that nonsense.