20:32 FIFA World Cup Final: France 0 Croatia 0: These players will be the biggest games of their professional careers at Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow.
Argentina’s Nestor Pitana will take charge of the final.
Croatia players are wearing red and white check shirts, white shorts and white socks. While France wear navy blue shirts, shorts and socks.
19:45 FIFA World Cup final: France and Croatia named unchanged line-ups: France and Croatia both avoided any surprises as they named unchanged line-ups for the World Cup final on Sunday, setting up a heavyweight midfield clash between N’Golo Kante and Paul Pogba on the French side and Luka Modric and Ivan Rakitic for Croatia.
Croatia coach Zlatko Dalic brushed aside concerns about possible fatigue after his team played extra time in all three of their knockout matches.
Dalic said on Saturday that he trusted his players he tell him if they were not fully fit. “If they will be unable to give their all during the match I expect them to tell us,” he said.
France coach Didier Deschamps has fielded the same starting line-up in every knockout-round match except the quarter-final against Uruguay when Blaise Matuidi was suspended and replaced by Corentin Tolisso.France won all three knockout ties inside 90 minutes and have had an extra day to recover for the final.
19:32 FIFA World Cup: Buyan the bear predicts Croatia will beat France: Buyan, a brown bear kept in a Siberian zoo, has predicted that Croatia will defeat France in Sunday’s World Cup final.
Two halves of water melon were laid on in Buyan’s enclosure in the Royev Ruchey zoo in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. One half of the melon had a small French flag planted in it, while the other had the Croatian flag sticking out of it.
Buyan, a male Siberian brown bear, sauntered up to the water melon halves, momentarily sniffed at the French one, before shuffling across to the Croatian water melon. He then proceeded to sit down next to it and munch away enthusiastically.
Buyan is one of a menagerie of animals in host country Russia that have predicted the outcome of World Cup games, with rivals including Sochi’s Harry the otter, Samara’s white goat Zabiyaka, St Petersburg’s cat Achilles, Kaliningrad’s hippos Milya and Glyasik and Nizhny Novgorod’s tapir Cleopatra.
Their predictions have not always been accurate. A Croatian victory would be a huge upset, with France firm favourites to win the World Cup for a second time.
19:30 FIFA World Cup: Hopeful fans gather in Paris: Crowds of cheering French soccer fans began gathering in Paris on Sunday, draped in red, white and blue and singing the Marseillaise, as excitement was building ahead of the France-Croatia showdown at the World Cup final in Moscow.
A day after the nation celebrated Bastille Day – the storming of a prison during the French Revolution in 1789 – with a late-night fireworks display over the Eiffel tower, large numbers began congregating in the same spot to watch the final.
A fan zone had been set up in front of the Eiffel tower with giant TV screens and space for at least 90,000 spectators, officials said. Many were already there five hours before the match kicks off, with faces painted, flags draped and voices in full song.
Source: Rediff