France beats Brazil at women's World Cup; Wendie Renard scores

BRISBANE, Australia — What a rambunctious Saturday night in Australia’s third-largest city, when the Brazilian fans sang a cappella, the French players jubilated, the stadium shook with Brazilian yellow all around the premises after a tying goal and the World Cup felt downright electric. France’s 2-1 win that heated up the mild winter didn’t begin to cover it. The energy outside and inside Brisbane Stadium seemed to forge yet another emblem of women’s soccer’s great whoosh forward in global life this young century.

Fans streamed up nearby Caxton Street in droves past bustling bars, then watched a match of alternating possession and whipsawing charges. The famed yellow shirts of Brazil massed 8,700-and-some miles from São Paulo, then filled a stadium for yellow-card testiness and time-honored whingeing about refereeing. The Portuguese and French languages turned up on sidewalks so far from their origins, before they morphed into shouts at a match both highbrow and high-quality between sides with high hopes.

Neck hairs saluted, especially when Brazilian fans picked up their national anthem where the music gamely left off for them. France went atop Group F alongside Jamaica with four points to Brazil’s three, and the 49,378 fans departed knowing they had made and heard thunder, not a bad way to live a Saturday night.

“It was — I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this before,” said Pia Sundhage, who previously managed the U.S. women’s national team and has managed Brazil since 2019. “It was really loud. … That’s why it feels a little bit harder, even tougher, after the game, that we did not win.”

The noise carried on in waves and booms, two of the last ones going up when Sundhage summoned 37-year-old star-of-stars Marta among three substitutes in the 86th minute — it’s her sixth World Cup — and when Brazil’s last chance began with a free kick to the right of the top of the box and ended with the ball caroming around players and maybe even giggling (but not in French). Brisbane had staged an international, intercontinental wonder, and at least one Brazilian fan had worn a kangaroo suit, the pouch up front flawless for storing a mobile phone.

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France Manager Hervé Renard called the atmosphere “magnifique,” easy to say even after the yellow card he received at the end for his tantrum about the seven minutes of added time bloating into nine. His team won in a manner that led that mainstay Eugénie Le Sommer to say, via interpretation, “I think we were up to scratch,” after an opening goalless draw with Jamaica seemed suboptimal. It won with goals from two of its long-standing towers: 34-year-old forever attacker Le Sommer in the 17th minute and 33-year-old forever defender Wendie Renard in the 83rd.

That latter play made the French happiness utmost. With the score at 1-1 and Brazil all recovered from its lukewarm start and the contention leaving no hints about what lay ahead, France’s Selma Bacha knocked a corner kick from the right. It curled up and over everybody in the scrum until a sole, towering, elegant figure moved around the edges on the left. It looked an awful lot like Renard, in her 148th cap for Les Bleues, as she became the last person possible to meet Bacha’s ball, heading it straight down to her right so that it bounced through players and into the open right side.

“She is a leader of the team,” said Hervé Renard, the impossibly cosmopolitan 54-year-old who has managed men on the national teams of Zambia, Angola, Ivory Coast, Morocco and Saudi Arabia (including its 2022 World Cup upset of Argentina) and now the French women only since late March. “She is a lot of times efficient in scoring a lot of goals like today. If she was unable to play” — as seemed possible after an injury in the first match — “I’m sure it would not be the same.”

He called her “the most important player in the dressing room — always talking, motivating.” He said: “Our level is to be always ready to be very strict defensively and respect the tactic. This is the job also of Wendie, and she is doing very well.” And as her clever header bent the net and she wheeled around the back of the goal to meet her teammates for some post-goal revelry, France had kept its head after Brazil had made the stadium shake.

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That happened in the 58th minute, when Brazil’s Ary Borges started about 30 yards out on the left, then nudged a pass to Kerolin nearer the middle. Kerolin quickly shipped one forward to Debinha, who made her way beyond the defense so she could corral the assist and poke the ball to the right past goalkeeper Pauline Peyraud-Magnin.

The score stood 1-1, and Brazilians stood and bounced. Their team’s push countered early moments when, coming off a 4-0 win over Panama, Brazil suddenly trailed. “I could not make them play [early on] the way they played in the practices,” Sundhage said, soon adding, “The French players were so much faster and quicker to get [to loose balls], which was disappointing because I think the players that we have are fast and quick.” She deemed her team “not precise enough” and said, “I think capricia is a very good word.” Maybe the big noise conferred big responsibility.

France began by threatening Brazil’s goal particularly with headers from Le Sommer. One of those headers, in the 13th minute after a fine cross from Kenza Dali, forced Brazil goalkeeper Letícia into a slow-motion recovery to her right for the save. The ensuing one did better.

It had its origins out on the prairie to the left, where Sakina Karchaoui sent in a long diagonal. Kadidiatou Diani met that in the box with a header of exquisite touch, which made its way gently over to Le Sommer, whose header took it farther left and past Letícia’s sprawled right glove.

That loosed some good noise — if not quite Brazilian noise — and a French group hug among players in the right-side corner. The night had much more fine mayhem to go.