Brazil national team fans celebrate (Reuters)
Seven winners of the group stage qualified for the quarter-finals of the World Cup.
The eighth - Croatia - beat Japan on penalties.
That is, she was not superior to her except in the decisive kicks.
It's not 2014, where all 8 house winners advanced to the quarterfinals, but it's high compared to previous World Cups.
It also ensures that the best teams will play in the quarter-finals, even if France, Portugal, Brazil and Argentina lost in the group stage.
In the end they were the best and serious teams in the World Cup and this quarter-final, including the surprising Morocco, is exactly the quarter-final that this great World Cup needed.
We didn't plan it that way, after all Spain was marked as the one to advance to the quarter-finals, but Germany was also marked that way, and both played at home where Japan finished first.
They didn't deserve it, certainly not for Spain, which hasn't won since the 0:7 over Costa Rica, which was the exception that didn't prove anything about the rule.
After all, there were minutes in the last round when Costa Rica was in the last eight and Spain was not.
In the beginning it looked different.
Spain national team (Photo: Reuters)
It's not because Spain did or didn't do it on purpose against Japan in the last round of the group stage, to meet Morocco and not Croatia - that's not karma - it's because Spain is just not good.
Spain is a lot of spirit and less of everything, it is football that sanctifies possession of the ball and not the conquest of goals.
There were minutes yesterday against Morocco that Spain had the width and not the spirit.
Spain has excellent players, but not all of them were in Luis Enrique's squad or squad.
Talented children played on the field, without sufficient experience.
There is almost nothing left of the young team of Lopetegui that beat Italy in the 2013 Junior Euro final, but Italy didn't make it to the World Cup either, so maybe that's why it was a mediocre year.
In practice, if not for Puyol, Xavi and Iniesta, there would not be the great Barcelona - with or without Pep - nor the Spain of 2008, 2010 and 2012.
In the end it's a matter of a generation and this generation of Spain is not worth more than the last eight, even if they lost to Morocco and not to Brazil or France.
Morocco is the passion that came from the house phase.
It's hard to see them getting past Portugal as well, who impressed in two of their four games in the World Cup, but Morocco conceded one goal - and it was also by myself - so with passion alone you don't reach the top 8 in the world.
There is also a passage there.
Japan's arrival - and overall incredible run at the World Cup - was largely down to coach Hajima Moriasu, as was Walid Raghraghi's success in Morocco.
Their ability to change formations and use the bench was impressive compared to the ability of more well-known, marketed and inflated coaches.
Sometimes, a local coach, who knows the mentality, feels the players, and controls the dressing room - which is what is required of a national team coach, after all, he can't teach them football - makes the difference.
This is an important pillar of the mythological debate on the sports street in Israel - a foreign or local coach for the national team.
We like the foreigners when they promote football, less when they train the national team.
We may also have received an answer here as to why.
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Proved the importance of knowing the mentality.
Hajima Moriasu (Photo: Reuters)
28 goals were scored in the round of 16 even though there was one 0:0 game, seven goals each day, 3.5 goals per game.
The goal record in the round of 16 was broken and the goal record is also from the same World Cup in which a result of 5:1 was achieved, the previous record: the 1986 World Cup, the first in which the round of 16 stage was introduced.
Also in the previous World Cup there was a good amount of goals in the round of 16: 24, an average of 3 goals per game.
You expect the knockout stage to be careful, but this is a round of 16, not a quarter-final, where top teams meet surprising teams.
With the exception of the matches between France and Poland and especially between Portugal and Switzerland, there was not one match that did not look like a miss match on paper and precisely these two matches were completely one-sided.
In the end, there is no bluff, a good team cannot afford to play tactically at this stage, and the real differences are emphasized here.
There is no scoring here, there is a winner and a loser.
Spain played like it was the group stage, so did Croatia.
One won and one lost - in penalties - but the one who played like there was no tomorrow, won big.
Don't expect too much from the quarter-finals, mainly because there are matches at the level of the Champions League quarter-finals, for example England against France, which could be dragged into a tactical battle, but there is no legality to it.
Since the beginning of the millennium, there have been quarterfinals of only 5-6 goals and there also 10-11, but when Croatia, Morocco, England and maybe also Holland and Argentina are there, it is not clear if we will miss the early stages or if we will continue to enjoy it.
As if no monkey got off his back.
Messi (Photo: Reuters)
The eighth round of the finals surrounded the big stars, for better and for worse.
Memphis Depay was recalled to appear after a group stage that was all Cody Gakpo, and it helped the Netherlands to be decisive in the round of 16;
Messi is Messi and his first knockout goal in the World Cup was not forced and was not a penalty, but also not one that will be remembered like Maradona's goals.
It was a classic Messi goal - supremely accurate - as if a monkey didn't get off his back there;
Harry Kane scored in the round of 16 after a lively group stage, and this is the previous World Cup goalscoring king and a goal machine that is still working;
Kylian Mbappe continued his group stage, as if it was another Lorraine or Ajax in the French league;
Neymar came back in time and Brazil gave a show, although even without him they are dancing quite well.
Only Cristiano Ronaldo was absent.
Physically 72 minutes, but practically he is not here.
Ronaldo had the hardest year of his life, not only in his career.
Georgina, his partner, only gave birth to a daughter out of the twins she conceived;
He experienced a difficult separation from Manchester United, including professional humiliation, and he has no love for the team either, when the heirs - especially Ramos yesterday - no longer account to him and give him the upper hand.
Ronaldo is 37 and a half years old, like big huge stars he can't digest that it's not the same anymore, so people like Erik ten Haag and even Fernando Santos have to face the decision of what to do with him and in Portugal, especially, eternity is the most non-eternal thing that exists.
In 1998, I got to see with my own eyes, right under his statue in the old Luge Stadium in Lisbon, the legendary Josepio armed with a medicine bag, adored by dozens of people who turned their backs on him as soon as the car of one, Joao Pinto, left the underground parking lot.
It's a sad moment for football, but a moment that comes every now and then, if you don't know how to stop it in time.
It also exists in Israel.
Soccer stars withered, humiliated, ended up in legal courts, because they were treated as human and did not recognize their supermen once their kryptonite evaporated.
Only Haim Rabivo retired in Israel as a great.
There is no credit in football, neither in Israel nor in the world.
Will he get off the stage with a final against Messi?
Ronaldo (Photo: Reuters)
And in this matter it should be said: this wonderful competition between Messi and Ronaldo, which has strengthened us for more than 15 years, which makes us fantasize about a final between Argentina and Portugal (where Ronaldo is no longer a team player as of yesterday), will end one day, very soon.
Already today the world has a new star: very fast, formidable, a wonderful kicker, a winner.
Kylian Mbappe may - and not only because of the records he is already smashing, World Cup records - also overshadow these two, huge and alien as they were.
We engage in comparisons between Messi and Ronaldo, between Messi and Maradona, and forget that there was once a Pele here, less photographed, but much bigger, like Michael Jordan.
As someone who has accumulated several hours of video on Pele, you can say that this French boy is the closest thing to Pele that has been here since forever.
Pele boy.
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