Will France buck the opening round jinx?

For those who came in late, the French team of today resembles the Germany of the ’90s.

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Doha: Mostly indestructible, fearsome depth, near-complete domination, zero nerves. Gary Lineker’s famous quip about football being a simple game, 22 men chasing a ball for 90 minutes and in the end, the Germans always winning, could now apply to the defending world champions here in Qatar.

True, there was a time in the 2000s when an imperious Zidane-helmed Les Bleus was the gold standard in world football, but while the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, this current generation’s indomitable spirit and quiet grit bears more resemblance to a German model of recent yore than their own original masters.

The one little thing, however, that sets the two apart, apart from the terrifyingly direct and effective methods of Kylian Mbappe, is that little spectre of implosion that Didier Deschamps’s men bring to themselves. True, Lothar Matthaus and Jurgen Klinsmann, the two German legends of the 1990s couldn’t apparently stand the sight of each other after a point, but that was at Bayern ‘Hollywood’ Munich and it seldom seemed to affect the Mannschaft.