Join the Miguel Delaney: Inside Football newsletter and go beyond the game with exclusive insightsJoin the Miguel Delaney: Inside Football newsletterJoin the Miguel Delaney: Inside Football newsletterTRY 1 MONTH FOR FREEWhile everyone was looking for two other stars, Ousmane Dembele went supernova.And yet in defying all of the narrative about Kylian Mbappe and the absent Erling Haaland to propel this World Cup of individuals, France’s hat-trick scorer may have actually started to tell the story of this team.If one doesn’t get you, the other will. That doesn’t just apply to Dembele or Mbappe, however, but also the effervescent Michael Olise, Bradley Barcola and Desire Doue, who added a fourth here in Foxborough.Maybe it’s appropriate that the prospective champions display such super-abundance in the country famous for it.It certainly felt fitting that the reigning Ballon D’Or winner would step up in this vaunted race for the Golden Boot, when hopes for this box-office bout between Mbappe and Haaland had been dashed by Norway’s approach.The merits of Stale Solbakken’s controversial move to rest all 10 of his outfield players for this 4-1 defeat, when they still could have finished first, will only be revealed with the next results.And while there is actually some team spirit value in ensuring all of your squad get to experience minutes on the pitch at a World Cup, the travelling fans who paid hundreds of thousands of Norwegian Krone to be in “Boston” (actually Foxborough, miles away) might not have seen it that way.There were chants of “we want Haaland” early in the game. Everyone instead got to see a different show, rather than the showdown.Dembele turned it on, scoring a 25-minute first-half hat-trick. The most remarkable thing was how similar the goals were, almost all of them involving the forward turning inside to smash the ball with his left to Egil Selvik’s right.The pick of them was still the first, which came after just seven minutes and set a distinctive pace.France’s Ousmane Dembele celebrates scoring their third goal (Reuters)It was also set up by a supreme Mbappe pass, the Real Madrid forward personifying this attack’s ability to do another thing just when you were expecting something else. You could say the same about Olise’s passes and Doue’s movement, the latter claiming his first World Cup goal late on to ensure it rightly wasn’t all about Dembele.With the forward hitting three and Mbappe failing to score…
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2026-06-26 22:53:24
