His talent, skill and character make him one of his country’s all-time greats, but ‘Grizi’ still suffers from a lack of appreciation
Antoine Griezmann plants a kiss on the World Cup trophy after France beat Croatia in the 2018 final in Russia.Antoine Griezmann plants a kiss on the World Cup trophy after France beat Croatia in the 2018 final in Russia.. One of them, Antoine Griezmann, trotted around the whole periphery of the pitch on his own to applaud the crowd.
Here is another of those paradoxes. The two managers with whom he’ll always be associated, Deschamps and Diego Simeone, place tactical discipline and combativeness at the very top of footballing virtues. Yet Griezmann, the most agile of minds to go with the nimblest of feet, never rebelled against their rule, when others would have felt it stifled their creativity.
He was capable of the most delightful touches, but eschewed the spectacular if the mundane would bring a better outcome. He could do everything; he could play in any position. He took France to the finals of Euro 2016 and the 2018 World Cup first as a right-winger, then as a second striker, and, in Qatar, morphed into a deep-lying playmaker of such grit, imagination and radiance that you wondered if it shouldn’t have been his role all along.
But that race is now run. There will be no 138th cap and no 45th goal for France, when it was taken for granted that Griezmann would carry on and turn up for his fourth World Cup in 2026. Perhaps he felt that, having started the semi-final of Euro 2024 against Spain on the bench, he no longer was an automatic starter for Deschamps. Perhaps being overlooked for the captaincy when Lloris retired and Mbappé was picked instead played its part.
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