World Cup 2018: Uruguay go down without a fight – a strange reality for a team once famed for its bite

Changing Uruguay’s image is his legacy but Oscoar Tabarez might conclude that his men did not quite fight hard enough to keep the World Cup dream alive

“Three Million Dreams” declared one banner inside the stadium, which perches on the banks of the Volga. It was a reminder that Uruguay were the smallest nation left in this World Cup but in Montevideo and Salto, the city on the Argentine border where Luis Suarez and Edinson Cavani were born, they dream very big.

If you want an idea of the expectations in Uruguay, consider this. Before Oscar Tabarez took the country to the World Cup for the first time, Gallup commissioned a poll, comparing competing nations’ views of themselves with views that others had of them.

The poll found that Uruguayans’ opinions of their chances were 49 times higher than the opinion other nations had of them. That poll was conducted before the 1990 World Cup. It seems extraordinary that 28 years on, Tabarez was once more managing his country and all those dreams.

Of the 23 other men who managed in Italia 90, five are dead and only one other is still prowling the touchline – Valery Nempomnyashchy, who took Cameroon to the quarter-finals and is now managing 1,500 miles away from Nizhny Novgorod at Baltika Kaliningrad.

It would have been the height of romanticism to have wanted Tabarez to manage Uruguay in the World Cup final. To see a man hobbled by Guillain-Barre syndrome, a disease that breaks down the nervous system and which has forced him to use a stick – in the Copa America he was ferried around in a golf buggy – would have been a triumph of the spirit.

When Cavani scored twice to eliminate Portugal, it seemed there might be a chance that the grand old man of Uruguayan football, who counts writers and philosophers among his circle of friends, might make it to the most vivid of sunsets.

However, Cavani was injured and his absence, like that of James Rodriguez for Colombia against England, seemed to drag Uruguay down. His replacement, Cristhian Stuani, made as much impact in Nizhny Novgorod as he did in his season with Middlesbrough.

Luis Suarez similarly struggled. At 31 there will probably be no more World Cups for Suarez and Cavani, and the sight of Suarez trying to keep the peace as Kylian Mbappe’s attempt to ape Neymar threatened to flare up into a mass brawl carried with it a sprinkling of irony.

His previous two World Cups ended with red cards and suspensions. In the 2010 quarter-final with Ghana, Suarez handled on the line, Asamoah Gyan missed the subsequent penalty and Uruguay went on to win the subsequent shoot out. Suarez revelled in the incident claiming that “this was the real hand of God”, stoking the comparisons with Diego Maradona. In Natal, four years later, there was the bite on Giorgio Chiellini. This time, he left quietly and so did Uruguay.

There would have been a romanticism in watching Oscar Tabarez take Uruguay to the final (Getty Images)

Tony Benn, who would have admired Tabarez’s politics given he named his daughter after Che Guevara’s last girlfriend, suffered from Guillain-Barre syndrome and described the experience as “walking in Wellington boots filled with water”. Sometimes, it appeared Tabarez’s side were playing in them.

Aside from the timing of Cavani’s injury, what will eat away at them is the way in which they lost. France had two shots on target and scored from both. Before the match, the France manager, Didier Deschamps, who is now two games away from winning the World Cup as a player and a manager, remarked that what really impressed him about Uruguay was how they defended.

“Defending as a team” is a cliché but Deschamps commented that, against Portugal, he had seen 10 Uruguayans protecting Fernando Muslera’s goal.

There were four blue shirts around Raphael Varane as he headed home the first French goal but only Stuani came close to the Real Madrid defender and it was not nearly close enough.

The arc of Varane’s header was very similar to the one Martin Cacares saw brilliantly saved by Hugo Lloris. The difference was measured in fraction of inches, fractions of seconds.

Varane’s header handed France their first goal (AFP/Getty Images)

Muslera’s error in palming Antoine Griezmann’s shot into his own goal will be measured in years. You Tube will ensure that it will never disappear. It was similar to David De Gea’s error against Cristiano Ronaldo in Sochi, except that the Manchester United’s keeper’s mistake did not cost his side the World Cup.

For comparisons you would have to go back to Loris Karius and Liverpool’s disastrous performance in the Champions League final. Curiously, just before his error, Muslera had nearly given the ball away to Griezmann, just as Karius had had it nicked off him by another Frenchman, Karim Benzema, in Kiev.

Instead of keeping a low profile, Karius has released a short, hugely crass film that depicts him diving into a swimming pool somewhere in the Hollywood hills before indulging in bit of semi-naked table-tennis. Muslera would be well advised to go on holiday without a camera crew.

It was no way for Oscar ‘El Maestro’ Tabarez to say goodbye. His mission, he said, was to take Uruguay back to the levels that once had been theirs in the last century. The World Cup wins of 1930 and 1950 are probably unachievable now but in South Africa, Tabarez matched the fourth place they had earned in Mexico in 1970.

When Tabarez went to his first World Cup as a manager, he had taken over what would now be called the ultimate “shithouse team”, the one that had attempted to hack Denmark to pieces in 1986 before being humbled 6-1. Changing Uruguay’s image is his legacy but Tabarez might conclude that this Uruguay did not quite fight hard enough to keep those three million dreams from dissolving.