There was this famous story from the late 1980s of Viv Richards walking down the Headingley steps for the toss in a Test match in England. Captain of the all-conquering West Indies team, the inimitable Richards left his counterpart, Chris Cowdrey, waiting in his blazer before appearing in a Bob Marley T-shirt and surfing shorts.
Cowdrey continued with the tradition of reading out the names of the players in his team for the Test match, but Richards stopped the England captain and told him: ‘Play whoever you want, man, it’s not going to change anything’.
Those few words summed up Sir Vivian Richards, the only batsman in the history of the game who intimidated some of the greatest fast bowlers of his time without ever wearing a helmet.
He stared them in the eye with a chewing gum in his mouth, before hooking and pulling them into submission.
From the mid 1970s until the late 1980s, Richards was a talismanic figure of the West Indies team that sent shivers down the spine of every opponent in world cricket.
But it was their fearsome four-pronged fast bowling attack that built the most enduring legacy of West Indies cricket.
In Malcolm Marshall, Andy Roberts, Michael Holding and Joel Garner, they had four all-time greats unleashing fury on the batsmen with a deadly combination of pace and bounce.
Unlike Dennis Lillee, the legendary Australian fast bowler, the West Indies pacers never resorted to a verbal battle on the field.
Marshall, Roberts, Holding and Garner let the ball talk, with the red cherry often whizzing past the batsman’s nose, and a few unlucky ones found themselves in hospital wards, nursing both physical and psychological wounds.
Now, fast forward to 2026: it’s the incredibly strong French team that has stamped its authority at the World Cup.
There is still a long way to go in this competition; Didier Deschamps’ team have clearly put daylight between them and other contenders.
In a World Cup where top teams have found it incredibly hard to win matches convincingly, France seems to be in a league of their own.
In just four matches, Les Bleus have scored 13 goals while conceding just two.
Eight years after their second World Cup triumph, four years after the heartbreaking final loss to Argentina, head coach Deschamps has built the team with a blend of experience and youth.
The team is teeming with talent, but it’s their four attacking players up front who are wreaking havoc on the rival.
The French front four of Kylian Mbappe, Bradley Barcola, Ousmane Dembele and Michael Olise has proved unstoppable in North America.
Just like the iconic West Indies pace quartet, the four French attacking players launch brutal assaults on the rival defence with ruthless finishing and clinical interplay in the final third.
Mbappe is the absolute superstar of this team. Four years after his stunning hat trick went in vain against Argentina in the Qatar final, the Real Madrid superstar seems to be on a mission to win his second World Cup title.
Having already scored six goals from just four games in the tournament, the 27-year-old has become a nightmare for the defenders with his predatory instincts and that incredible close control inside the box.
His first goal against Sweden in the round of 32, when he danced past several defenders in the box before firing an unstoppable shot, would have made the Brazilian Ronaldo proud.
Remarkably, Mbappe now has 18 goals in 18 World Cup matches, second only to Lionel Messi’s tally of 19.
The former PSG striker is destined to break the all-time record with Messi, 39, appearing in what is likely to be the final World Cup of his career.
But the sheer dominance of his French team, which will take on Paraguay on Sunday for a place in the quarterfinals, is not built on Mbappe’s talent alone.
Each of the other three in the attack, Barcola, Olise and Dembele, can hurt the rival team in the blink of an eye, with the latter scoring a sublime hat trick against Norway in the last group stage game.
This French team have already earned comparisons to the famous 1982 Brazil team. Featuring Zico, Socrates, Falcao, Eder, and Junior, that Brazil team captivated the world with their creative passing game.
But the French 2026 team is more direct, relying on their speed, strength and technical ability.
Former England defender Gary Neville felt for every team that has the unenviable task of stopping this French juggernaut.
“Those four (Mbappe, Barcola, Dembele and Olise) that started the game (against Sweden) – they will cause nightmares for every single defender in the tournament, and I don’t know how they stop that to be fair,” Neville said on ITV.
Arsenal legend Ian Wright said the only team that can beat France is none other than France itself.
‘It’s only if France have a total capitulation, which I can’t see, for them to (not) go on to win it. I can’t see what’s stopping them at the minute,” Wright said on ITV.
Can France continue to blow their opponents away and reach the final on July 19 to complete the redemption arc, having lost on penalties in 2022 to Argentina in the greatest World Cup finale of all time?
It’s highly unlikely that Mbappe, Barcola, Dembele and Olise have heard of the legendary West Indies cricket team of the 1980s.
Despite their dominance in world cricket, the Caribbeans slumped to a shock defeat to India in the final of the 1983 World Cup.
Anything can happen in a one-off game. And if that game happens to be the final of the football World Cup with more than a billion people glued to the television, the aura of invincibility can collapse like a pack of cards.
But this French team appears to be just as strong mentally.
Now, can they hold their nerve and finish the tournament as strongly as they have started it?
If they do, France will deserve to be in every conversation when pundits read out the names of the greatest football teams of all time.
Source: Khaleej Times