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Azteca vs the Three Lions

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Mexico’s Competent and Hardworking Footballers

It was a game for the ages. England beat Mexico by the skin of their teeth, with only ten players after Jarell Quansah was issued a red card for a studs-up challenge to Jesús Gallardo after only 54 minutes of play.

I did not think England would win because of what I saw in the earlier Mexico vs Ecuador game at the same Azteca Stadium. The 80,000+ roaring fans help propel their team to victory. Today, every Mexican fan in the stands was given a Mexican flag to wave. The sight of 70,000-some Mexican flags waving in unison must have sunk the hearts of the British footballers.

But then Jude Bellingham scored twice for the Brits within three minutes around the 30-minute mark of the first period. Six minutes later, Julián Quiñones answered with a goal, followed by a penalty kick from Harry Kane. In the second period, the only score was a Mexico penalty kick from Raúl Jiménez at 69 minutes.

With the score at 3-2 for England, Mexico took advantage of Quansah’s red card and attacked the goal from all sides. Somehow, the English held out for the win.

If the refereeing by Australian Alireza Faghani were not scrupulously honest, England might well have lost. I have seen some really dicey official calls in some of the games I’ve watched, particularly in the France-Paraguay contest.

David vs Goliath

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Cape Verde Islands Football Team Celebrating Victory Over the Saudis

Today I watched an amazing match between the football teams of Argentina and the Cape Verde Islands. Earlier, I thought the existence of the Cape Verde team in the elimination rounds of the 2026 World Cup was a fluke.

Well, it was no fluke. Argentina played well, and they scored a goal in the first half. But then Cape Verde was playing just as well, and they managed to equalize. This led to an additional thirty-minute period being added. I had to stop watching at that point, because I wanted to cook up a pot of Spanish Rice for dinner.

Toward the end of cooking, I switched on the television and saw that the score was tied 2-2. Within seconds, Argentina scored again, and the valiant Cape Verde team struggled to equalize within the last minutye bor two of the extra period. They couldn’t, and the final score was 3-2 for Argentina.

I am a fan of the Argentina club. Over the years, I have visited Argentina three times and saw large swaths of the country from Iguazu Falls across the border from Brazil in the North to Ushuaia in the South, a scant 600 miles from Antarctica.

At the end of the game, as I saw the sadness of the Cape Verdeans and the jubilation of the Argentinians, I thought I would have been equally happy if the score was the other way around. In the fight between David and Goliath, it is not surprising at the support David gets.

Unfortunately, in the elimination stages, one side wins; and the other side packs their bags and returns home. I think when the Cape Verdeans return home, they will be treated as heroes. They had an incredible run, discomfiting strong teams such as Spain and Uruguay along the way.

I think we’ll be seeing more of them.

Brazil vs the Tartan Army

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Brazil’s Vinicius Jr and Scottish Goalkeeper

As part of my broken collarbone recuperation program, I watched a great soccer football game between Brazil and Scotland. Played in Miami, the stadium was packed with Brazilian and Scots supporters.

Brazil played a great game, with the South Americans winning with a score of 3-0. The announcers seemed to be mostly supporters of the Scots. While Vinicius Junior was taking apart the Tartan defense, all the announcers seemed to talk about was the convoluted mathematics that would allow the Scots to continue after their mediocre showing in the group stage for Group C.

I can understand that the Fox TV audience would take to British announcers more easily than they would a Brazilian announcer with a thick Portuguese accent.

In the end, the announcers finally conceded that the Brazilians played a superior game in every category that they could measure, but the Scottish team was clearly the sentimental favorite. And, in my estimation, the Brazilians played with more heart. It was a pleasure to watch them.

Watching Sports on TV

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Messi and Teammates Celebrating After World Cup Victory

I woke up too late on Sunday morning to watch all of the Argentina-France World Cup Final. But I did see the second half, followed by the two overtime periods and the penalty kicks. And that hour and a half or so was the most exciting sports event I ever saw on television.

Now that pretty much everyone has weighed in on the game and Lionel Messi’s triumph and Kylian Mbappé’s stoic loss, I thought I would say a few words about the act of watching sports event. I am uniquely qualified inasmuch as I rarely watch sports events and have no clearcut team identification in any sport. Moreover, when I was growing up, my father would get so teed off when one of the Cleveland teams lost—and in those years they lost with amazing frequency—that I would have to go into hiding to avoid the paternal wrath.

It is only recently that I have come to love watching two types of sports events which, coincidentally, occur at four-year intervals. I am referring to World Cup Football (men and women) and the Summer Olympics. (The Winter Olympics—Meh!.) I have little interest in baseball, which typically involves a few minutes (if any) of intense action stretched out over several hours. American football, to me, is characterized by lots of starts and stops, followed after the so-called two-minute warning, by another hour or so of play.

Basketball has a lot of action, but there’s a lot of starts and stops there, too, as if the sport were devised with advertisers in mind. As for hockey, I find it too hard to follow the puck across the ice. All I see is the mayhem.

Only soccer football has continuous action, except for times when a player is injured or pretends to be injured. The final on Sunday built up to a pitch of excitement such that I have never experienced with any other sport. There was so much skill spread among so many players that it was a pity that someone had to lose. I would have been equally happy for either France or Argentina to win the game.

The Other Football

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Argentine Footballers Celebrating After Scoring Against Poland

Yesterday, I watched the World Cup match between Argentina and Poland. Unlike most viewers, there are a whole lot of teams I like. I realize that the United States is still new at this game and can be upset by the likes of Liechtenstein or Moldova. A generation from now, I suspect that what we call soccer will be more prevalent, if for no other reason that parents won‘t want their sons growing up brain-damaged like Herschel Walker.

In yesterday’s game, I liked both Argentina (as I’ve visited their country three times) and Poland (because I’m Eastern European myself). Argentina won the game 2-0, but both Argentina and Poland advanced to the quarter finals. I think it was because the sum of the team members’ jersey sizes was a prime number.

The announcers kept talking about how surreal the end of the game was because so many teams were still in play, irrespective of their win/loss standings. Also considered in the standings were scores for remembering to say “please” and “thank you”; the number of syllables in the first stanza of their respective national anthems; the teams’ overall dental hygiene; and how well the teams could pronounce the name of the country they were in. (I think the latter is something like “Catarrh”, no?)

Argentina dominated the game, but the poles had one real hero in their goalie, Wojciech Szczesny. (Gesundheit!) For the entire first half, he batted away everything the Argentinians could throw at him, including soccer balls, off-color epithets, and one extremely rusted steam locomotive. Only in the second period did two goals get by him.

The Star of the Polish Team: Goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny

Although soccer football does have its problems, such as the higher mathematics involved in calculating who gets to move on to the quarter finals and the treatment of draws. In American sports, there are a lot of stops and starts to allow for advertisers to plug their products and services. Soccer football games stop only for injuries, and then they add a mysterious number of make-up minutes after the regulation ninety minutes. I guess Americans will just have to get used to all that intensity and uncertainty. The rest of the world seems to have.