Nobody asked for a third-place game. Not the fans, not the players, and certainly not Eric Nathan, who spent Saturday afternoon publicly wondering why a sport built entirely on vibes and stoppage-time guesswork suddenly needs a consolation bracket. It's a fair gripe. FIFA drags the two semifinal losers back onto the pitch, slaps a bronze medal on the winner, and calls it closure. England and France, both still nursing semifinal wounds, got the honor this time in Miami.
Eric Nathan couldn't get past the basic premise of a third-place game existing at all.
I would never expect soccer to make teams play for 3rd place. Seems very un-soccery. They don't stop the clock, they make up where the ball should be spotted, pretty much everything is based on vibes but then they make the teams trot back out to play for 3rd. I don't like it.
Then the ball actually got rolling and the whole "nobody wants this" premise looked shaky fast. England came out flying, and it took all of 3 minutes for Declan Rice to get the Three Lions on the board. Barstool's main account had the goal up within the hour, dubbing it the opening shot in the "humiliation match."
England's early strike on France, with Rice wearing the armband and celebrating the breakthrough goal.
That was just the opener. England kept the foot down, and by halftime they'd built what would end up as a 4-0 cushion behind Rice, a Ezri Konsa header off a corner, and a Bukayo Saka brace, before France clawed back into it in the second half. England eventually escaped with a wild 6-4 win, their best men's World Cup finish since 1966, capping a 10-goal shootout that was the most combined scoring in a World Cup match since 1982.
None of that was obvious in the moment, though. Ten minutes in, all anyone on the timeline knew was that England looked sharp and dangerous, which is exactly what prompted BarstoolChief to start floating the idea of Tuchel getting cute with his bench before the game was even a quarter old.
Chief clocked Tuchel eyeing his bench, half-joking that Dan Burn could be next in.
Tuchel is itching to bring on Dan Burn right now
The Dan Burn chatter is its own running bit at this point, the internet's favorite way to imagine a lumbering center-back parachuting into a knockout game for no reason other than comedy. He never actually got off the bench in Miami, but that's beside the point. The idea alone was enough to have people invested in a lineup card 10 minutes into a game half the country insists shouldn't exist.
That's really the story of this one. A fixture nobody wanted turned into the kind of chaotic, error-riddled track meet that made Eric Nathan's complaint look almost quaint. Tuchel walked into the bronze match still carrying scrutiny from England's semifinal exit, and walked out having coached his side to their best World Cup finish in 6 decades. Say what you want about the third-place game being a manufactured afterthought — for about 90 minutes in Miami, it played like anything but.