MYT: 1. Besak; 14. Kapetanovic, 4. Mbala-Ekakia, 5. Sulejmanovic; 2. N. Ovcina (sub. Ivankovic 70’), 7. Atsev (sub. Aganovic 62’), 8. Smajic (sub. Urbanc 76’), 6. P. Odonelec (sub. S. Milosevic 70’); 10. Kuhar-Arh; 9. Ocokoljic (c), 21. Prpic-Bosanac (sub. Skara 76’)
MYT: Mbala-Ekakia 86’
GRF: Kristoffersdóttir 83’
There is an old line about waiting for a bus for ages, wasting valuable time, only for two buses to turn up at once and leaving you exasperated. You get to where you need to be eventually, but the experience is rather galling. The World Cup group stage match between Mytanija and Græntfjall must have felt a little bit like that for the neutral, anybody expecting a tense, high-stakes all-Rushmori encounter – particularly if they were expecting a similar match to the bad-tempered Mytanija versus Pasarga play-off – might have been left feeling a little bit short-changed. You can’t have fun all of the time, though, and the fun in this game did arrive eventually in the space of four rather wild second-half minutes.
Mytanija started the match without Grigorij Savicevic, the veteran centre-half suspended due to the red card he received for deliberately using his hands to prevent a Pasarga goal in the crucial play-off second leg. Mahir Kapetanovic got his opportunity to impress on the international stage, a solid performer at Top League level with Liria who had followed the commonly trodden path from Mytanija to Nephara, now at Coret Hawks. He wasn’t a youngster anymore, so the step into the starting eleven shouldn’t have been too much of a shock, particularly given the handy number of appearances he made during qualifying. That didn’t prevent Græntfjall from trying to get at him early on, getting the ball wide to Vanessa Marvinsdóttir at every opportunity. Kapetanovic mostly acquitted himself well, however.
The game ended up becoming a battle for the middle of the pitch, as it so often does, with both teams looking to use three players to control the centre and everything else orbiting around them. Gavril Atsev and Mersudin Smajic were accompanied by Omer Kuhar-Arh, playing a little further forward as a number ten, trying to assert dominance over the Græntfjaller trio of Tinni Grímólfursson, Danny Oddkellsson and Kæja Finnvarðsdóttir. The Mytanar front two found themselves a little swamped by the opposing back four; and Græntfjall’s front three found the same against Mytanija’s back five, with Nemanja Ovcina and Patrik Odonelec operating alongside the central defenders rather than roaming forwards as they might do against lesser opposition. A game of free-flowing football this was not.
Dzvezdan Kitanchev had said that he was prepared to be pragmatic to win games, ‘pragmatic’ in the most widely understood meaning of the phrase when it comes to football: i.e., by turning games into nearly unwatchable snore-fests. Lev Repin would be spinning in his grave if he wasn’t alive and well and coaching Chromatika. Kitanchev is happy to coach his style most of the time, but he sees the sport a little differently to Repin – who believes wholeheartedly that his style is the best way to win games – with a much larger degree of flexibility in the methods he can use to get results. That led to this match, with much deeper wing-backs, much less direct passing and Jezdimir Ocokoljic and Fran Prpic-Bosanac both tasked with dropping into midfield areas out of possession to form an extremely diffiuclt to breakdown 5-5-0 shape.
You can say what you like about how difficult to watch it is, but it was undeniably effective whilst Kitanchev’s starting line-up were out on the pitch, suffocating the game and bringing Mytanija closer to what could be a huge point in the context of the group. Unfortunately, it is also an enormously tiring tactic, particularly when you are prepared to cede possession for long periods as Mytanija were. The midfield battle became less of a two-sided affair as the game progressed, Atsev, Smajic and Kuhar-Arh all prepared to merely occupy space and try to prevent Græntfjall from exploiting any gaps. Gavril Atsev was the first to flag around the hour mark, then it was the turn of the wing-backs, with both Nemanja Ovcina and Patrik Odonelec beginning to tire around eight minutes later. Mersudin Smajic and Fran Prpic-Bosanac went off just over five minutes later. All of a sudden the Hoops’ well-drilled starting eleven was broken-up and whilst the players coming onto the pitch were all fine players, they were arriving into the match cold and perhaps a little out-of-sync with the tenacious defensive shape.
Græntfjall began to move higher and higher up the pitch, penning Mytanija deep in their own half and that 5-5-0 shape gradually became completely impossible to decipher such was the ragged positioning of the players in green-and-white. Tanrısal’s 25-year old attacking midfielder Kæja Finnvarðsdóttir was able to pull the strings a little more often, dropping in between the Mytanar lines and exploiting any pocket of space she could find. Eventually her quality – and the Snow Wolves’ pressure – told, Finnvarðsdóttir threading a pinpoint reverse pass in between Adnan Sulejmanovic and the slightly off-the-pace newcomer Sacir Milosevic at right wing-back. Sara Kristoffersdóttir, now a well-seasoned pro after a long career at a high-level at Chromatik giants Wirr Tsi, beat the offside trap and smashed the ball low beyond a stranded Semir Besak.
The problem with a more pragmatic approach such as the one employed by Mytanija is that when you have fought for so long to stifle the opposition and then finally end up conceding it is very difficult to summon up the inspiration to fight back and equalise. There is also an old adage about being the most likely to concede just after scoring, you are on a high, perhaps not paying concentration in the same way as before. Mytanija managed to summon up the inspiration needed to equalise late on and Græntfjall might well rue their drop in concentration to let the Hoops score.
Dzvezdan Kitanchev may have brought off a number of players, but one man who is untouchable when a game is in the balance is Jezdimir Ocokoljic. He and Omer Kuhar-Arh – another who played the full game – hunted the ball down in midfield and Kuhar-Arh managed to bring the ball forward under pressure. He used Ocokoljic’s clever movement – taking a defender away – to bear down on goal and just as the Græntfjall defence realised they might have to close Kuhar-Arh down at some point the Brinemouth playmaker slid Ocokoljic in. The legendary striker was ready to shoot immediately, looking to send the ball towards the back post, but Grímúlfur Gunnþórsson made an impressive recovery to get a long leg across to block the ball and send it out for a corner.
Edin Aganovic trotted across to take the corner whilst Mytanija’s big men strode up to the Græntfjall menacingly – at least, it might have been menacing were the Græntfjaller defenders not all Fucking Enormous. Mahir Kapetanovic, Bigger Mbala-Ekakia and Adnan Sulejmanovic would all look to make it difficult for them. Zahir Ivankovic was stationed on the halfway line to prevent any Græntfjaller counter-attacks, but with every player back to defend the late corner that seemed unlikely. Aganovic raised his arm and then everybody was in motion, Kapetanovic making a run towards the middle of the goal, Sulejmanovic spinning around to the back post. That seemed to sow confusion among the Græntfjall defence and allowed Bigger Mbala-Ekakia a near enough free run to the near post.
That’s where Aganovic swung the ball towards, swinging away from goal with pace. Bigger Mbala-Ekakia just needed to meet it cleanly given the pace on the ball and he managed to do that, meeting the ball in-line with the near post and redirecting it just inside the top corner of the net. An equaliser right off the training pitch. Mbala-Ekakia ran away with a broad smile on his face, Aganovic the first to meet him with a celebratory embrace before every one of his teammates joined them along with most of the players from the bench. It wasn’t a match Mytanija had been tipped to get much from – against the nation ranked 5th in the multiverse – but a risk-averse approach had opened up the possibilities for them.
Mytanija had strangled the life from the game for 80 minutes, turned the match into a ten minute shoot-out and came away with something. The hope would be that neither Huayramarca nor Milchama would manage the same sort of result and that the Hoops could secure positive results against their two other group rivals. It was a formula for progression, which was Kitanchev’s goal. It might not have been out of the Repin playbook and it certainly wasn’t pretty, but if it secured a place in the knockout rounds again – what would only be the second time since World Cup 68 – then that was all that mattered. Pragmatism would be looked upon very positively if that were the case.
(86’)
(67’ Sigurbergur 
), Grímúlfur, Asbjørn 
(88’), Kæja 
