PS1: I continue to ask for recommendation votes here, saying that free books don’t require everyone to spend money, so it should be fine to give more recommendation votes? Thank you here~

PS2: Let me talk about the book friends group here. The group numbers are three, seven, zero, five, four, nine, nine, one, nine, and the verification answer is NTR Knight, well, that's it.

Due to the series of changes and butterfly effects caused by Zhuang Mingge's time travel, the opening match between the South Korea and Japan World Cup, from France and Senegal in their previous life to the current defending champion of the Italian World Cup, and Croatia, who also comes from Europe and is one of the dead souls of the Italians in the French World Cup.

Arrangement of the defending Italian champion to play this opening game is what Zhuang Mingge wants to complain about the organizers of the World Cup most. Although there is no problem with this schedule on the surface, don't forget that when the World Cup was drawn in group draws, Italy was assigned to Group G... Has anyone seen an example of being assigned to such a backward group, and the team still had to participate in the opening game?

Let’s talk about the complaints about the World Cup organizers for now. Let’s talk about the two teams Italy and Croatia that are hard to match on the court.

The strength of the Italian national team, which has first-class stars such as Vieri, Inzagi, Toti, Buffon, etc., does not need to be too detailed. Although the selection of Pierro and Koko has caused some controversy, in terms of the players' personal abilities and the overall strength of the team, Zov's Blue Army can still steadily suppress their opponents in the opening game, Croatia, the bronze medalist of the last World Cup.

After all, unlike Italy, where excellent players emerge one after another, Croatia, which has experienced two wars in the past decade, has completely exhausted its national strength by the endless war. Tujiman and Mesic, who have been dizzy by the decline in domestic population and economic weakness, have no extra financial resources or energy to develop football that brings a huge sense of honor to the Croatians. This situation has led to Croatia's feat of winning the third place in the World Cup in 1998 as dazzling and short-lived. In the following four years, as the main players of the third-place team of the World Cup have grown old, and there are very few young talents who can succeed. The situation of being incompetent has quickly withdrawn from the ranks of first-class teams and has fallen to the level of second-rate in Europe.

Therefore, before the opening game begins, except for a few hardcore Croatian fans, most fans are optimistic that the defending champion can break the curse of the opening game of the World Cup, defeat Croatia that blocks them, and win a good start in this World Cup.

At the beginning, the trend of this game was indeed as these fans hoped. Italy, which had the strength, quickly took the initiative in the game with its hard strength that was more than one level above its opponent, and in the 24th minute of the game, their ace center Vieri scored first. After receiving Toti's straight pass in the penalty area, the world's strong center directly used his extraordinary strength to squeeze out Robert Kovac, who was guarding him, and then turned around and shot hard to break through the Croatian national goal Pretikosa's ten fingers, scoring the first goal after the opening of this World Cup, and it was also the first goal of the Italian national team in this World Cup!

However, as the game deepened, the situation on the field did not, as people expected, Italy, which had a leading advantage, would take advantage of the victory and completely deal with the opponent Croatia in the subsequent time, but instead, there was a development that surprised everyone!

Faced with a bad situation where he fell behind with one goal and was at a disadvantage in the scene, the Croatians did not surrender in advance, nor did they shrink their defense out of fear of the huge power of Vieri and others on the offensive end. Instead, they unexpectedly launched a fierce counterattack in the following time!

Although Davao Suk, who claims to be able to play the violin with his left foot and Prosineski, the only remaining "Three Musketeers", are now old, and Boban, the former midfield engine, has become a thing of the past, for Croatian football, which once raised many famous stars, no matter how talented the people are withered, there are still some powerful players who are in their prime.

Although no player in the current Croatian team, including captain Soldo, can reach the first-class level in terms of personal abilities, his team has powerful players such as Kovac brothers and Soldo who are rich in competition experience and maintain good condition, as well as rising stars such as Simici, Olic, Simonic and other rising stars who are not very famous but have poor talent but are down-to-earth and willing to work hard. Therefore, in response to this situation, Milko Jokic (current Croatian head coach) boldly changed the technical control flow style that he had persisted from the Golden Generation of Croatia after falling behind in the score, and replaced Davao Suk, a meritorious old minister, with Olic, to strengthen physical confrontation and counterattack ability in the midfield and frontcourt, forcing Italian players to make mistakes in the game, thus giving them a chance to turn the tables.

Facts proved that Jokic's move was quite correct. Faced with the crazy encirclement of Croatian players, Albertini, who was responsible for controlling the rhythm of the game, performed disappointingly. Not only did he not use his sharp pass to make the Croatians run away, but he made frequent mistakes under the opponent's siege, which gave the Croatian strikers a large number of shooting opportunities, and even helped Olic help the plaid team tie the score one-to-one in the 73rd minute of the game!

In fact, this is not a big deal for Albertini. Although this Milan team deputy, Guardiola, Redondo and Paul Sousa are collectively known as the four talented midfielders in the 1990s by fans, his advantage lies in the ability to cover the entire midfield running and long passes, rather than being able to break out a path among the troops with one's own strength, like Ronaldo and Vieri.

So, Zoff made a mistake from the beginning. He shouldn't have pushed Toti onto the forward line and allowed Albertini to control the rhythm of the game alone. Although this could fully utilize the scoring ability of the Roman prince, it reduced Italy's field control ability by several levels.

Just three minutes after Olic equalized the score for Croatia, Italy, which had not yet recovered from the loss just now, was hit hard again: Albertini's straight pass to Toti was intercepted by Nico Kovac in the middle, and Kovac then passed the ball directly to Olic who had withdrawn from the penalty area. The latter used the space left by Cannavaro to assist Rapac to score, rewriting the score on the field to two-to-one!

In this way, after nearly an hour of unremitting efforts, Croatia, who was behind half the game, finally completed the overtake of Italy before the end of the game and became the leader in the score!
Chapter completed!