Portugal vs. Uruguay is going to be a hideous masterpiece

Iago Aspas, what have you done?

The corner-taking legend’s late goal for Spain against Morocco didn’t just turn the game from a loss into a draw. And it didn’t just nudge Spain from second to first in Group B. It also bumped Portugal from first place into second, which means the Portuguese will take on the winners of Group A. And that means ...

Whoever Wins ... We Lose

We don’t want to overhype this, but we could be approaching some kind of event horizon of shithousery. Uruguay are the undisputed masters of the art, a team built from gristle and needle and spite. Their marking is aggressive, their organisation is terrifying, and they approach the art of disruptive violence with the care and attention of a highly experienced torturer. (Named Diego Godín.) No messing about. There’s the weak spot. And there. And ... broken.

What’s particularly admirable/appalling about Uruguay is their commitment to the cause of being Uruguay, all the time, no matter what else is going on. They don’t just bunker down and shithouse up when playing against the bigger sides. They do it to everybody. They did it to Saudi Arabia. Get the goal, kill the game, and kick anybody who tells you otherwise. It would almost feel gratuitous if it weren’t so on-brand.

But Portugal aren’t too far behind. Much of this is down to the relentless work of Pepe in central defence, though it feels insufficient to think of him as just a defender. Rather, he is a diabolic hell-clown, sent from Below to provoke opponents, confound officials, and annoy anybody who happens to be watching.

A fun game: watch Pepe for 90 minutes and try and keep track of the injuries he appears to sustain. Then try to imagine what state a mortal human body would be, if all those injuries and all that agony were real. The probable answer is that he would be invalided out of the game before the hour, but nobody truly knows, because all attempts to watch Pepe for 90 minutes end early in a cloud of swear words and loathing. Partly of him, partly of the self.

But this isn’t a one-man show. Like Uruguay, with Edinson Cavani and Luis Suárez up front, Portugal have calculated that the best way to maximise their genius goalscorer, Cristiano Ronaldo, is to make themselves monstrously hard to beat. With the ball, they can pass it around neatly in midfield; without it, they deploy a full range of ankle-taps, face-clutches, and other assorted misdemeanours. In Euro 2016, they won just one game in 90 minutes, but they went through the tournament undefeated and eventually won the thing.

So we’ve got Pepe at one end, marking Suárez, and Godín at the other keeping an eye on Ronaldo. Two midfields that can play football if they really have to, but seem to really enjoy not doing. Two teams that prize not losing above winning, and are happy to live in the grey areas to achieve that. And above all this, we’ve got the watchful benevolent eye of VAR, scanning the game for any nonsense.

There will be nonsense. It was suggested that VAR might lead to a decrease in simulation, it being harder to con a referee who can check the tape. That doesn’t seem to have happened. But there has been an increase in the badgering of referees, a new ritual of everybody crowding the official to say: “Yeah, but just check. Yeah, but just check. Yeah, but just check.”

Perhaps that’s just the natural consequence of introducing an effective appeal court. First you get lots more appeals. And then you get loads of borderline penalties and Ronaldo not being sent off because he’s really famous. To think people were worried that VAR would mean they had nothing to argue about. Opta doesn’t track “imaginary squares drawn in the air/90”, which is perhaps just as well: here they might run out of numbers.

Is this going to be a pretty game of football, one that will remind you of all the reasons that you love the sport? No chance. Is this going to be an edifying sight, that will warm your heart to the best humanity has to offer? Absolutely not.

But is this going to be a Grand Guignol spectacle, a carnival of chicanery, a remorseless investigation into the very depths of footballing depravity? With any luck: yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Noise music, splatter horror, and Portugal vs. Uruguay in the last 16.

And just think. If Spain had gone through in second, then Godín would have had to mark Diego Costa. That might have ended the world.