The French celebrations told a story. Led by their captain, Kylian Mbappe, the team sprinted towards the hard-core group of French travelling fans behind the goal, euro-dancing up and down to the beat of Freed From Desire.For 70 minutes, Paraguay had played with corseted restraint, frustrating France with organization, concentration and no little gamesmanship. They had prodded, poked and provoked, testing every final nerve of their French opponents.Then, at last, one of the French forward line broke through. Substitute Desire Doue provided the magic, tiptoeing past opponents in the penalty area and daring a dangling leg from Diego Gomez. After video review, Mbappe dispatched the penalty. Even then, Paraguay, a limited side, continued to play with caution, but more than that, they sought to unsettle their opponents in manners outside of the laws of the game.Doue is felled in the box, leading to the winning penalty (Photo by Howard Smith/ISI Photos/ISI Photos via Getty Images)At a certain point, the admiration for Paraguay’s underdog defiance and spoiling strategy gave way to exasperation. This showing passed the threshold of cute and clever into cynical and callous.Matias Galarza, the midfielder who plays for Argentine side River Plate, took on the role of provocateur-in-chief. In the first half, as France attacked down the right wing, Galarza took Mbappe out off-the-ball, appearing to strike the French forward with his arm.In the second-half, the Paraguayan then deceived the Uzbek referee Ilgiz Tantashev into a yellow card for Michael Olise. As Galarza and Olise faced up in an altercation, Olise pulled the Paraguayan’s jersey, but Galarza collapsed to the floor holding his face. There had been no contact.Galarza falls to the floor after a confrontation with Olise (Getty Images)Before Mbappe scored his penalty, Gustavo Velazquez, the Paraguayan defender, scuffed the penalty spot, another under-hand attempt to disturb the tournament favorites. On that occasion, the French team were one step ahead. Their Ballon d’Or winning winger Ousmane Dembele had the ball in his hands, a decoy to avoid unwanted attention on the actual taker Mbappe, and Dembele quite literally laughed in the face of the petulant Velazquez.Jules Kounde appeared to take another arm to the face late on, while Didier Deschamps, the French coach, repeatedly looked over to the opposition dugout with a sigh. He appeared rather non-plussed to see almost every Paraguayan substitute leaping out of the dugout to appeal for free-kicks and cards for even the most innocuous of French challenges. After securing safe passage to the quarter-finals, Deschamps said Paraguay had used “every trick in the book” and insults from the opponent’s bench that he “could have done without.”At the final whistle, Mbappe clenched his fists and appeared to look the other way as Paraguay’s goalkeeper Orlando Gill sought a handshake. Gill threw the ball against Mbappe’s back in response. Deschamps said he dispatched his two “burliest lads” from the bench to protect Mbappe at the end of the game, avoiding his star man becoming embroiled in altercations which could have drawn disciplinary action.“We showed that we are not only a team who plays flashy attacking football,” Mbappe said afterwards. “If we have to put our hands in the s***, we will put our hands in the s***.”He added: “They thought we’d show up in tuxedos, make some fancy moves, but football’s not just that. We did it today. We were better than them.”The French frustration was not entirely directed at their opponents. There was bewilderment, also, at the failure of the referee to get any kind of grip or control over the Paraguayan antics. Remarkably, in a game defined by the South American team’s lack of sportsmanship, this became the first World Cup game in which a Paraguay player did not receive a yellow card since 1998.Rayan Cherki, the French midfielder who entered the game as a substitute, said: “How many fouls did they make? Thirty? Forty? And no yellow card?”For those who watched the game, the following statistics may feel like a trick of the mind, but there were, in fact, only 11 fouls by Paraguay in the game, compared to 13 for France. Yet these were only the fouls for which the referee deigned to blow his whistle. France received three yellow cards, to Paraguay’s zero.One of the features of this World Cup has been the desire of FIFA officials, under the direction of former World Cup final referee Pierluigi Collina, to be lenient in games and allow matches to flow without excessive disruption. There were new rules announced pre-tournament to minimize time wasting via exaggerated injuries or via substitutions. Yet this game appeared to show the scales tipping too far the other way, whereby so much was bypassed that it diminished the finest talents on the field, in a way that many neutrals considered unfair.In television studios, the Paraguayan behavior yielded condemnation. On the BBC, former England and Manchester City goalkeeper Joe Hart described the Paraguayan players as an “absolute disgrace.”“If they were my players, I’d be dragging them off the pitch,” Hart said. “I would never want to win that way. I would never want to play football that way.”Zlatan Ibrahimovic said Paraguay deserved red cards, telling FOX Sports: “I like to play the real game.”The former France international Thierry Henry said: “Football won. I don’t want to talk about Paraguay.”Others may see shades of grey and argue that Paraguay are within its right to target any possible weakness in pursuit of an on-field edge, even if that weakness is the referee himself.We have seen no shortage of teams do so before at international tournaments, while coaches such as Jose Mourinho and Diego Simeone have sometimes pushed the boundaries and the dark arts in knockout football. The failure was less in Paraguay trying it on — as pathetic as it looked — and more in the refusal of the referee to put an end to the antics. By the end, as French players received yellow cards for relatively minor misdemeanours, it was almost tempting to wonder if the referee was in on a Paraguyan joke, so hard it became to square the discipline applied to France with the leniency shown to Paraguay.Despite their sense of injustice, the French took pleasure in having overcome a tricky evening.The long wait to break through cannot only be attributed to underhand tricks, as Paraguay approached this game with a clear tactical plan against a team comprised of vastly superior players. If we take the valuation of the starting XI’s according to Transfermarkt, the French team was worth eight times that of their opponents, and half of Paraguay’s value in that model derives from Brighton’s Diego Gomez and Strasbourg’s Julio Enciso.Mbappe celebrates at full time (Photo: Al Bello/Getty Images)We should be careful here to not stray into snobbery about this strategic plan. Paraguay are entitled to make a choice to defend, to be compact, to break up play and limit space in behind their five-man defence, particularly in a game played at 100 degrees Farenheit.To do so is no affront to football; it is merely self-preservation against a France team who are the tournament’s favorites and have swept aside all before them. When Paraguay attempted to play with more ambition, they were torn apart against the United States, so we can only imagine what a similar approach may have produced against France. It may not be aesthetically pleasing but there was a belligerent beauty in the way Paraguay shut down spaces and limited supply lines to France’s most gifted players.“It’s not football that will bring people to the stadiums,” Deschamps said. “But they defended well.”Few would begrudge Paraguay this recognition, but the skulduggery did produce eye-rolls and requires stronger officiating. Several of the French players appeared to share Mbappe’s frustration and validation. Cherki said the French display, in the face of such intimidation, had shown the team to have been “warriors” from start to finish.“Today we showed that whoever wants to go to war against us we’re ready to go to war as well,” Cherki smiled.