Surprisingly, the best player in the barrage match against Sweden was a Czech player!

The prestigious statistics server WhoScored also collected data in the barrage match between Sweden and the Czech Republic. The big surprise is that despite the loss, the Czech national team was voted the best player on the field. It was a very unfortunate match for the Czech Republic. After 120 minutes we lost to the favoured Nordic team 0:1.

Czech dreams of qualifying for the 2022 World Cup were dashed. A combination of sporting luck and the home backdrop eventually sent the Swedes to the final of the barrage. However, nobody should be ashamed of our performance, the match went very well (in terms of performance) considering the initial conditions set before the match.

Especially during the first half, it visually looked like the Czech side was producing several superior performances. During the second act, some performances went slightly downhill.

Still, WhoScored picked Czech captain Tomas Soucek as the man of the match. The stats site gave him a nice rating of 8.06.

Soucek had 81 touches of the ball during the match (the most of any Czech) and his passing success rate was about 65%.

The defensive midfielder scored plus points in the air! Tomas Soucek won an incredible 15 header duels (the most of all), in comparison the second best header of the match was stopper Nilsson with 8 duels won.

The Czech captain also made two key passes and twice got on the end line. As far as defensive activity is concerned, the West Ham midfielder won five foot-to-foot duels and cleared the ball out of the danger area 7 times (for the Czech Republic).

The second highest rated Czech player was the much criticized Jakub Brabec before the match. However, the experienced stopper was rated 7.15 by WhoScored.

Detailed statistics of the match show that both teams created the same number of shots. According to the xG metric (number of expected goals), the Swedes won 1.4::0.8. Anyway, this statistic does not include the disallowed goal (shot) by Jan Kuchta, which according to the referees was preceded by a (non)foul by Jakub Brabec.

Sources: WhoScored, The Analyst