{"id":781187,"date":"2026-07-05T05:25:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T05:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/781187\/"},"modified":"2026-07-05T05:25:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T05:25:08","slug":"kylian-mbappe-pops-off-against-paraguay-we-won-and-we-were-better-than-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/781187\/","title":{"rendered":"Kylian Mbappe pops off against Paraguay: ‘We won and we were better than them’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes “The Beautiful Game” can get ugly.<\/p>\n

Such was the case Saturday evening during France’s 1-0 round-of-16 victory over Paraguay to reach the quarterfinals of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.<\/p>\n

Superstar striker Kylian Mbapp\u00e9 scored a penalty shot in the 70th minute that stood as the game’s lone goal.<\/p>\n

Mbapp\u00e9 was given the opportunity to shoot unimpeded after Paraguay’s Diego Gomez was called for tripping after a video review.<\/p>\n

That rough play was the only crack in what, otherwise, was an impenetrable Paraguay defence, as the South American side appeared to employing a purposefully conservative game plan, often making borderline plays trying to get under the skin of a French side that came into Saturday’s match having scored a tournament-leading 13 goals.<\/p>\n

The constant provocation from Paraguay ultimately didn’t work, but after the match, Mbapp\u00e9 had choice words for how things shook out on the pitch.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe show Paraguay that if they want to play dirty, we can also play dirty,\u201d Mbapp\u00e9 said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This was one of a number of fiery quotes from Mbapp\u00e9 that Italian soccer journalist Fabrizio Romano collected.<\/p>\n

France will play Morocco, who defeated Canada 3-0 earlier on Saturday in their round-of-16 match, in the quarterfinals on Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometimes “The Beautiful Game” can get ugly. Such was the case Saturday evening during France’s 1-0 round-of-16 victory…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-781187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}