Before the start of the tournament, it was still a little unclear how the hosts would perform and how high their actual performance would be. For the majority of football followers, they were a big unknown and after the first game it was very clear that Qatar simply did not have the potential to compete with the best teams in the world. It was supposed to be a football festival, the opening game between Qatar and Ecuador. However, it became the opposite. The World Cup hosts didn't perform well against a team that many think is, after Qatar, the worst in the group. Now Qatar faces an impossible mission and it will be very difficult for them to win points in the remaining matches against Senegal and the Netherlands. The pressure is now on Qatar. That could suit Senegal, even if coach Aliou Cissé's side also lost the opener, quite unfortunate and very undeserved. Coach Felix Sanchez Bas could not be satisfied with what his side offered. Qatar were the first World Cup hosts to lose their opening game and, depending on how things play out, could become the second hosts ever to miss the knockout stages as early as matchday 2. So far, that has only happened in South Africa in 2010 In terms of football, the team missed pretty much everything against Ecuador. There wasn't much to see of the Spanish style that the Spanish coach had established. Qatar were inaccurate, offensively harmless and vulnerable under pressure.

Senegal also lost their first World Cup game 0-2 and before the tournament Sadio Mané due to injury. Still, the mood couldn't be more different from Qatar as Aliou Cissé was pleased with his team's performance on matchday 1. The Netherlands could stand up to them for a long time, until the final phase the Africans were not very far away from a point. Until the moment when they conceded the first goal, Senegal played extremely disciplined in defense and were very dangerous in attack. The luck of the Dutch was that with several excellent interventions, the debutant in the goal of the national team had several great interventions. True, in some situations they lacked a little precision, but I believe that they will have an incomparably easier task in today's match. How dangerous Senegal was is shown by the statistics in the attack, which show that they had 14 shots in the direction of the opponent's goal. Individually, Senegal naturally has advantages. In the match against the Netherlands, Gueye dominated the middle of the field with good help from Kouyate, and the excellent Sarr caused a lot of problems for the opponent's defense in the attack. His physical dominance was obvious, even against one of the best stoppers in the world, Van Dijk, and I believe that in this match against a much worse defense, he will manage to score at least one goal. After this match, Senegal expects a match against Ecuador that will be incomparably more difficult than this one, and I am sure that for them the victory in this match is of great importance.