Can Messi stop England? Will France vanquish Spain? A guide to WC semifinalists

Hello and welcome to another edition of Offside. Now, there’s a phrase on OSINT Twitter: “monitoring the situation”. It refers to the lives of those individuals who are really into bird-watching, except their birds are usually military planes and other assorted objects of mass destruction.Football fans, too, have been monitoring the situation for the last month, figuring out where Cabo Verde is located or doing more maths than they did in high school while calculating which third-placed teams will qualify. We’ve gone through FIFA’s rulebooks to explain why VAR isn’t favouring Messi and borne the brunt of Ronaldo fans for pointing out that he has simply become too old to lead the attack of a nation like Portugal. Now, after a month, we are at the business end of the tournament.