Tunisia Blows Up Its Manager, Still Gets Blown Out

If there has been a worse performance in World Cup history than Tunisia’s, be content. They still have one more chance to cement their place.

The Eagles of Carthage are already eliminated from the competition after failing to keep an audience against Japan last night somewhere along the Saturday/Sunday border, depending where you call home. But lots of teams get eliminated after two games; it is in the nature of the competition that this happens to the minnows of world football, like Haiti, and the surprisingly underachieving, like Turkiye.

But the Tunisians went out spectacularly even by the nature of early knockouts. Not only did they eat it against Sweden, 5-1, and eat it again to Japan, 4-0, but they fired their coach, Sabri Lamouchi, after the Swedish loss, and did nothing any better for the considerably more Love Island-ready replacement, Hervé Renard. Lamouchi, who’d had the job for five months, become the first-ever coach to get fired after only one game of a World Cup; three others have been binned after two, including Tunisia’s Henryk Kasperczak, who like many national team coaches is not a citizen of the country he coached.