Tournament football always provides room for a team to cause shocks and go all the way due to the little number of games that are needed to be played.
The 2022 World Cup in Qatar has been a hotbed for upsets and surprising results. While African giants Morocco have dominated headlines, Croatia have also upset the apple cart once more.
In 2018, Zlatko Dalić’s side managed to reach the final of the competition in Russia. For this very reason, getting to the semi-finals this time around is seen as less of an impressive feat.
However, for a country with a population of under four million, labelling the achievement of consecutive semi-finals as incredible is an understatement.
Nonetheless, across the last two World Cups, Croatia failed to win a single knockout game in normal time.
In fact, in Qatar, Dalić’s men only mustered one victory in six matches and despite knocking out both Belgium and Brazil, many have claimed that Croatia were fortunate to get as far as they did.
In the semi-final against Argentina, this luck seemingly ran out as Lionel Messi and Julian Alvarez ran riot, making for a highly non-competitive final-four game.
But was it more than luck that aided Croatia in going so far in the tournament yet again? This tactical analysis, in the form of a team scout report, will look to provide readers with some answers.
This article will be an analysis of Croatia’s data as well as the tactics deployed by Dalić to see if the European minnows were in fact worthy of a spot in the penultimate knockout round of the World Cup.
Note: This piece was written prior to Saturdays third-place playoff and so the data may be slightly outdated.
Goalscoring issues
When observing Croatia’s goalscoring statistics throughout the tournament, the reading isn’t woeful.
While scoring six goals in six matches isn’t wonderful, it does show an emphasis on having a solid defensive set-up instead which is vital in tournament football.
Morocco are a perfect example of this. Walid Regragui’s warriors scored merely five goals in the lead-up to the semi-finals but had conceded just once.
There are two worrying details about Croatia’s xG map that need to be considered. Firstly, each of the Vatreni’s shots had an extremely low xG on average, registering at around 0.08 xG per shot.
This certainly isn’t ideal over the course of 61 shots, as Croatia boasted from their first match against Morocco to their defeat to Argentina in the semis.
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