“I asked the two biggest players to go surround Kylian at the end, because they were going to kick him to pieces… It wasn’t easy,” Didier Deschamps said after the battle against Paraguay at the World Cup.

“I had never played a match like that, with so many blows,” said the French midfielder Manu Koné. “I mean, dirty blows, shoves in the back. So yes, it was complicated,” said the Les Bleus midfielder, who got a card, like Barcola and Olise, while none of the Paraguayans did. Incredible but true.

“From the very first moment, we set out to make ourselves felt on the pitch, to be tough: if the ball goes through, the man doesn’t.

Orlando Gill (portero Paraguay)

Paraguay seemed to target Kylian Mbappé in particular, who, with his fluent Spanish, neither kept quiet nor backed down in the face of the collection of kicks, shoves and insults he was subjected to throughout the match. After the penalty, he responded by celebrating the goal in the face of the goalkeeper and one or two defenders, and in the end, the victory. 

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Mbappé left opposing goalkeeper Orlando Gill hanging, as he was trying to say goodbye to him. Instead, the French star celebrated right in his face, and the keeper blasted the ball into his back.

“That’s football. I reached out to shake his hand, but since he ignored me, I got angry,” he replied. “But anyway, that’s all I did, then I calmed down. The truth is they had a great campaign and France is the favorite to win the World Cup.”

Obviously this is football; if you’re not used to this, what can you do. Paraguay is a tough national team,” Gill admitted. “From the very first moment we set out to make ourselves felt on the field, to be tough, so that if the ball goes through, the man doesn’t, and I think the truth is the team behaved well.

We’re facing players who are fighting for the Golden Boot. We have guys who never knew their fathers or took eight years to do so… or who have to sell their clothes to save their daughter, like Gill—do you know how long it’s been since he was paid his salary?

Gustavo Alfaro (técnico Paraguay)

‘Andrés Cubas, Matias Galarza, Juan José Cáceres… the review of actions without a yellow card is something to analyze. “We knew what kind of match it was going to be. If we have to get our hands dirty, we know how to do it,” Mbappé said. “We also know how to play unattractive football. They thought we would show up in a tuxedo, but we were prepared. Even in that kind of match, we were better than them”.’

“I don’t want to criticize Paraguay, each team plays the way it knows how, but there were some insults from the other bench and it would have been good not to have them,” said Deschamps. “We received three yellow cards and were fouled many times… it was a very aggressive game”.

I didn’t know Paraguay could commit 30 fouls without receiving a yellow card

Rayan Cherki

‘For Galarza, the roughest one, things should have been even: “they committed more than 10 fouls. Paraguay plays hard but they play hard too”. The coach, Gustavo Alfaro, justified everything by the background of his players: “We faced players who are fighting for the Golden Boot, who are fighting to be the all-time top scorer in the Cups’. We have boys who never knew their fathers or took eight years to do so… or who have to sell their clothes to save their daughter like Gill.. do you know how long it has been since he was paid his salary?”.

“We knew the kind of match we were going to have. We made a great effort. Our identity is to win or die, and if we weren’t going to win the match, we were going to die”, said Mauricio Magalhaes, the winger born in Brazil but who plays for Paraguay and seems to understand La Albirroja’s motto perfectly. “I think we died on our feet, that is the most important thing”.’

“We fought a battle. We won it,” proclaimed the lightning-fast William Saliba, who hasn’t seen anything like this, not even in the Premier League. “We knew they were going to try to take us out of the game, the coach had warned us about it two or three days earlier,” he said.

“I didn’t know Paraguay could commit 30 fouls without receiving a yellow card… “, Cherki remarked. “Those who played the whole match, frankly, were guerrillas from start to finish. Whoever wants to go to war already knows what awaits them with us”.