Let\u2019s be honest about the nature of this game. Argentina had qualified as group winners, while Jordan were already eliminated. There was nothing riding on this whatsoever.<\/p>\n
And given the sheer number of Argentines here \u2014 it looked and sounded like about 95 percent of the crowd were behind the defending champions \u2013 it didn\u2019t really feel like a World Cup game at all. More a send-off friendly ahead of a World Cup. <\/p>\n
Dallas, where Argentina have played twice and many fans have used as their base for the tournament, has become their second home.<\/p>\n
Overall, the third round of group games has worked out excellently for Argentina. Not only did it have this gentle group finale, Argentina also had the good news that its round-of-32 match in Miami will not be a high-stakes, aggressive scrap against their great rivals Uruguay \u2014 but a much less intense fixture against Cape Verde. <\/p>\n
The African side has been one of the feel-good stories of this competition but this is as kind as you could hope for from a World Cup knockout match \u2014 let\u2019s not forget, Cape Verde hasn\u2019t won a game at this tournament.<\/p>\n
After that comes Australia or Egypt. The former caused Argentina problems in the last World Cup and the latter does boast Mohamed Salah, one of the few players in the competition who, at his peak, recorded Messi-like numbers from the right flank. But neither should trouble the world champions.<\/p>\n
Then, their most likely quarter-final opponents would be Colombia or Switzerland. <\/p>\n
Argentina not only had an easy group draw. The bracket has worked out very well too \u2014 they might reach the semi-final without facing anyone who has a genuine chance of following them as World Cup winners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s be honest about the nature of this game. Argentina had qualified as group winners, while Jordan were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":730554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,450,451,3,452,453],"class_list":["post-730553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=730553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/730554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=730553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=730553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=730553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}