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For 65 minutes at the MetLife Stadium on Tuesday, Senegal played the better football. Nicolas Jackson hit the post on the counter-attack in the first half. Ismaila Sarr, free in the six-yard box right before half-time, somehow put the ball over the bar from a position where scoring should have been the easier outcome. France had zero shots on target in the opening 45 minutes. Didier Deschamps, watching from the touchline, looked like a man whose tournament-favourite side had not turned up. Then Kylian Mbappe scored twice in the final 25 minutes, and the match that Senegal controlled for an hour ended 3-1 to France.
The chances Senegal missed will be the abiding memory of this defeat for their own supporters. Jackson's post-rattling effort and Sarr's glaring miss were the kind of moments that decide World Cup matches against the tournament favourites, and Senegal did not convert either of them. Edouard Mendy, in goal, was magnificent for long stretches, denying Michael Olise with a smart save after Desire Doue and Olise combined to create France's first genuine chance midway through the second half. Pape Thiaw's side, organised and confident, had done the difficult part. They had matched France. What they could not do was finish the job.
How France Turned It Around
The match changed in the 66th minute when Mbappe scored from a position that, for most of the previous hour, France had not been able to create. The build-up came from sustained pressure after Deschamps made attacking substitutions, introducing Bradley Barcola and shifting the structure to give Mbappe more direct service. The captain's first goal broke Senegal's resistance. His second, in the 90th+6 minute as Senegal pushed for an equaliser and left gaps behind their advancing players, sealed the result and confirmed the scoreline as more comfortable than the match had been for the majority of its duration.
Mbappe's brace took him to 58 international goals, breaking France's all-time scoring record, and 16 World Cup goals, equalling Miroslav Klose's all-time tournament record. He is two goals from becoming the outright leading scorer in World Cup history. N'Golo Kante had been asked before the match whether this fixture carried any sense of revenge for France's infamous 2002 opening-match defeat to Senegal. He dismissed the framing entirely, saying there was no such thing as revenge in football and that Senegal deserved credit for what they achieved in 2002, but that this was a new chapter. The new chapter, in the end, read like the old script with the names reversed.
What Senegal Showed and What It Cost
The honest assessment of this performance is that Senegal were the better team for the majority of the match against the side many consider the tournament favourites. That is not a small thing. Koulibaly, playing what he has described as his final World Cup, organised the defensive line with the composure that has defined his career. The midfield, with Pape Gueye and Idrissa Gana Gueye providing the platform, matched France's technical quality for long periods. The problem was not effort, organisation, or tactical discipline. It was conversion. Two clear chances, the post and the open goal over the bar, represent the difference between a result that could have changed the entire complexion of Group I and the 3-1 defeat that now sits on the record.
Senegal face Norway next, then the playoff-path winner in their final group match. Both fixtures are now must-win if they are to have any realistic route through Group I, given France's dominant position after this result. The performance against France, despite the scoreline, gives Thiaw's squad reason to believe they can produce results against less daunting opposition. Whether the finishing improves enough to convert that belief into points is the question the remaining two matches will answer.
