a perfect day

Meg and I watched this Japanese art house movie Perfect Days at the Projector. I did reflect on how many of such days we get. Thankfully they do come around occasionally and today is just such a day. 

I was grateful to have the luxury of waking up slowly, no alarms... just to the rising sun. Mom was up earlier as always and had already given thanks in church at mass. Josh and Nat were coming over for lunch with the family. Julian, as well, as he got onto the very last seat of the flight and on the way to Singapore.

Lunch was perfect, made with loving hands and fresh ingredients, not to mention a nice bottle of 7 year old Chardonnay. Nat didn’t partake of any and for the best reason in the world! 

The happy news was announced in the most surprising of way. I am usually quite quick but God delayed my reaction so you can all enjoy the delight in slow-motion! 

The meal was leisurely as there were no rush or stress and when it concluded, Meg and I went for a nice walk to further enjoy the moment together. 

I continued my amble while Meg went to pick up Julian and we all settled back home for more family meal time, this time on mom’s famous one pot soup, washed down with Umamu sparkling wine.

As the midnight hour approaches, I head to bed with a head dizzy with hope, a heart that’s full of love, a soul that is oh so grateful.

Thank you all for making this such a special day. A perfect day.

Tournament Thoughts

When the knockout round draws were decided, I had hoped for a Europe vs South American final. And my wish (as did many fans all over the world) came true when the champions of Europe will play the champions of South America. But I am getting ahead of myself, so let me start at the beginning.

At that time, no European team had yet beaten a South American one and the smart money was on the latter but these teams that play with teamwork besides talents got better and bested the South Americans along the way (notably Brazil and Colombia - two traditional powerhouses).

Indeed, this has been an unpredictable and entertaining world cup, with goals galore (the most ever, in absolute and on a per game basis) with the penultimate match serving up the best show!

Interestingly, or perhaps consequently, goalkeepers (and not just the strikers) entertained us further with heroics! And the fairy tales come no better than that of Cape Verde and Vozinha's. 

The half time entertainment, though,  was an own goal (except for Shakira who was the South American that had better moves than the entire Argentina team in the final).

On the other hand, some goals should have stood, Croatia's equaliser vs Portugal and Egypt's potential winner against Argentina being two of the more egregious calls.

As usual, there are good goals, especially given the impervious forms that Mbappe, Messi and Haaland were in as the tournament began.

Speaking of which, they should make a new award for fan participation for the Norwegian row, following in the spirit of the Iceland clap and the Mexican wave.

With all games played, we wave goodbye to this tournament in the most contrasting of fashion: France and England put up an exhibition match with ten goals, taking the goal count well above 300 with Saka scoring a hattrick. 

Mbappe clinched the Golden Boot (and becoming the Word Cup's biggest scorer of all time in the process) and Bellingham got onto the podium too, fittingly, for he played like a lion.

The one team that fell off the pole position (and further still in esteem) must be Argentina, goat notwithstanding. 

If Tuchel was blamed for defensive substitution in the semifinals when attacking substitutes have won so many games with late goals, then Argentina's utterly defensive play for well over 100mins simply didn't make sense...

... until one realises that its their opponent that made all the sense. Spain was improving throughout the tournament and by the time they beat France, Scaloni had to desperately come up with a new game plan including holding on for dear life until penalties and Dibu theatrics.

Until then, their playbook included the usual thuggery, feigned injuries and pressurising, even snitching to the referee but nothing worked. 

Spain (and football) won. 

If the bronze medal match showed fans what football could be, three moments post the final exposed what it should not be:  post match bust ups, unsporting gesture of turning their backs and an irrelevant vainglorious figure standing next to the winning squad all show how easily this beautiful game can descend into ignominy.

Then there is the GOAT debate. At this tournament, it was clear Messi was ascendant but at the end of the day, he's human after all. And not beyond fouling and snitching to win as well.

Ultimately, beyond our celebration of sports (and other) celebrities, the truest joy should come from beyond the mortals, to the divine. It is God we thank.

Spain saves football by Rohit Brijnath

On an unholy afternoon in New Jersey, football got lucky and a game got redeemed. In a one-sided final, Argentina were dragging the game into tedium and disrepute, littering it with 25 fouls, soiling it with six yellow cards and one red, burdening it with cynicism and zero shots on target, when beauty belatedly overcame the thuggish. Ferran Torres’ Spanish left foot was not just a brilliant instrument but a lifeline. It saved football.

Sport never takes a moral position. The deserving team don’t always win and neither do the fairer ones. Possession doesn’t always translate to goals. Flukish strikes sink dominant sides. Somehow we escaped all that on July 19. Somehow a red wave from Europe, which resembled most faithfully the idea of team, tied together like beads in a necklace, are owners of the trophy. Somehow justice prevailed.

Winning this Cup should be hard, but this was a slog. One team had an eloquence, the other was purposely inarticulate. Spain spoke in calm lyrics, Argentina in moody grunts. At one point it seemed it was 11 against one, the single Argentinian not being Lionel Messi but goalkeeper Emi Martinez, who nobly defended his net like a winged creature might its nest. Imagine if Argentina had taken it to a penalty shoot-out. Actually, let’s not.

No sport can promise the gripping finale, for this is the unscripted allure of competition. Rafael Nadal once tamed Roger Federer 6-1, 6-3, 6-0 in a French Open final but even that never felt as dispiriting as this. Somehow we thought, two glittering Cup nations, a kid with winged boots, a footballing Yoda at 39, Ethan Hunt and Odysseus in the stands, something heroic had to be in the offing. Mostly we found villains in blue and white.

We’re sleepy now, hungover, tired, frustrated, yet part of me is already missing the Cup which refreshes us like nothing in sport can. It reminds me the tournament itself is always bigger than a final and what we’ll take with us is not Argentina’s abysmal 32 per cent possession, but tiny clips of wonderful film which will play in our brains forever.

The 308 goals, some of them so heartbreakingly late, which made us levitate from our chairs. The fabulous flexing of unknown nations. The thank-you letters left behind by teams in dressing rooms. The acuteness of Thierry Henry’s analysis. The grin of Erling Haaland, as if to say didn’t you know that goal was coming.

Michael Olise on the balletic move. Bagpipe-playing Scots and inconsolable Brazilian fans. Goalkeepers stopping balls like Superman catches bullets. Egypt worn down by injustice. All of this we’ll remember instead of an over-long mid-game final show which felt like sacrilege. At half-time, we only pee, discuss substitutions, rehydrate, strategise, and I am just talking about fans.

My friends (many of them aren’t even devoted sports fans) and I spent a month sending WhatsApp messages scurrying across borders at 2.30am. Not for anything else, not for so long, do we do this. And this is also how the Cup won, in the way it woke people, brought them to this game, and always reminded us of its reach (a ball made it to the International Space Station).

The best of Cup football, told often through tales of immigrants shining for their new nations, somehow managed to subdue the worst of football, like a US President inserting himself into a red card debate. Skill dribbled past politics and talent outsprinted Gianni Infantino’s tastelessness. It was close but football prevailed.

I like that the game is hard in part, forearms in backs, jerseys pulled like leashes, close dances in the box during corners, shins examined, but there’s a line. Argentina danced on it for weeks, rugged and cussed and indefatigable and unstoppable, and then in the final, even after the whistle, they slid over that line into ugliness. They brought nothing beautiful of football to football’s biggest day.

Spain brought composure and control, the ball zinging off the boots of their players like a pinball machine. This is the nation of Salvador Dali and Picasso, but more importantly it is the land of Xavi and Andres Iniesta, professors of space, watching and applauding the exploration of their successors. Spain had to win. For football’s sake, the pretty had to tame the petty.

One fleeting image, of a few seconds, remains with me from the final. Lionel Messi, 39, sitting alone on the grass, genius spent and subdued. Then he sees Lamine Yamal, 19, approaching, and gets up and they embrace. It is an acknowledgement of talent, a recognition of struggle, an everyday act yet on this day feels more filled with meaning. A young phenom has come to pay respect. An old hero has risen to return it. Football’s uncomplicated beauty is always its saviour.

had this been the best world cup tournament ever?

This May Be the Best World Cup of All Time The tournament is at its most corrupt, overstuffed, and politically compromised. It’s also spectacular.

By Ryu Spaeth, a features editor at New York

It was as if Donald Trump had forgotten a World Cup was being played on American soil. With the glaring exception of the administration’s disgraceful treatment of the Iranian team, which was forced to shuttle back and forth to Mexico, the tournament had, as of early July, remained largely unaffected. All the controversies surrounding the World Cup at the outset — the extortionate ticket prices, FIFA’s unseemly relationship with despots and oligarchs, the specter of foreign fans being targeted by immigration officials — were muscled aside like so many defenders standing in the path of Erling Haaland. FIFA was putting on a superspectacle that, with 16 additional teams, had shown the greatest sporting contest on earth could get bigger and better. As Tom Brady posted on X, “Best World Cup ever????”

Trump, however, couldn’t resist putting himself at the center of attention. In a now-infamous intervention, he called FIFA president Gianni Infantino to argue that, in his studied opinion, the U.S. star striker Folarin Balogun had been unfairly red-carded in the match against Bosnia and Herzegovina, resulting in Balogun’s automatic suspension from the next one, against Belgium in the crucial Round of 16. A day before that game, FIFA reversed the suspension, to the absolute delight of American fans and the utter horror of almost everyone else. (Infantino denied in a statement that Trump’s call influenced the reversal decision.)

Here perhaps was the kind of nightmare many people had feared: the American president seemingly using his considerable influence with FIFA to rig the match. It was both pathetic (surely Trump has more important things to do) and a little scary. In the end, the U.S. crashed out of the tournament the way it usually does, in comically inept fashion. Balogun barely had an impact on the game; the Americans gave the ball away at every turn and were bullied by Belgians who were faster and stronger and seemingly extra motivated to kick some American butt. Balogun-gate served only to heighten the drama and the catharsis, and one almost suspects that Trump, showman that he is, knew that would happen.

It is tempting to see the American embrace of Trump’s actions as reflecting our fallen state. FIFA is corrupt anyway, the logic goes, so why not play along? This attitude is commonplace among the MAGA faithful, who excuse Trump’s behavior on the basis that politics is already hopelessly compromised, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer pointed out. But another great theme of Trumpism is that everything is entertainment. And here is where Trump and FIFA are most aligned, jointly overseeing a tournament whose scale is simply too epic, its emotions too high, for any force to knock it off its axis. Trump himself described it best: “Every game is like a Super Bowl.” Despite the corruption, and maybe even because of it, this really may be the best World Cup ever.

FIFA naturally would like us to credit Infantino, who came up with the idea to enlarge the tournament to a bulging 48 teams. Infantino has presided over the games like the authoritarians he is so chummy with, using a private jet to crisscross the North American continent, his unsmiling visage stamped on the World Cup like a dictator on his country’s currency. He wants the World Cup to be wholly associated with his person, and indeed the more you watch him frowning down on the action from the VIP seats, the more you realize that his bald, perfectly smooth head resembles nothing so much as a soccer ball.

But Infantino did not create the conditions for this expanded tournament’s success — namely, that most of the teams are actually good. World Cups used to be lopsided affairs with the talent concentrated in about half a dozen countries. In years past, a 48-nation tournament would have resulted in a surfeit of god-awful soccer. This year, we have been treated to a bonanza: tons of goals, intensely fought matches, unbelievable swings of fortune. The best game so far might have been England against Mexico, a storm-wracked contest played near the clouds at the famed Estadio Azteca, an Olympian 7,220 feet above sea level. Honorable mentions go to Egypt and tiny Cabo Verde (population 530,000) pushing Argentina to the limit in the knockout rounds, forcing the defending champion to score three increasingly frantic goals in each match to put them away.

That the overall level of play has risen to vertiginous heights, that nearly all the players are superhumanly fit and professionalized, and that classic powers struggle to fend off emerging ones is primarily the result of European club soccer becoming ever more popular, which in turn results in ever higher tides of money pouring into the sport. The cup runs over so abundantly that countries like Senegal and Morocco can stock their teams with players of Senegalese and Moroccan ancestry who have spent their entire lives in Europe being trained to be killers by top clubs.

Much has been made of the diasporic nature of this tournament: The traditional giants are packed with the descendants of immigrants and the colonized, while the upstarts feature players who have in a sense reverse-migrated to where their families came from. (Fifty-four players at the World Cup grew up in the hardscrabble suburbs of Paris alone, far more than are playing for the French team.) These global crosscurrents tell a story of violence, conquest, and displacement, but what really makes this world go round, at least when it comes to soccer, is cash. And the cash, spilling down to leagues in South America, Africa, and Asia, often comes from corrupt, politically connected figures: Middle Eastern tyrants, American billionaires, European oligarchs. These are figures who commit human-rights abuses, make all kinds of shady deals with all kinds of shady people, and have a predilection for breaking the rules.

The results for the sport as a whole are there for all to see, especially those who have watched a lot of World Cups and can tell the difference. This World Cup has simply been stunning, a compilation of moments that form a dizzying mosaic. I am thinking of Egypt’s Mohamed Salah taking a penalty so cheeky and deceptive that the goalkeeper appeared to collapse in despair; of Kylian Mbappé skipping across the box so quickly that he seemed to be teleporting; and of Lionel Messi’s astonishing first touch in his goal against Cabo Verde, in which he cradled the ball gently to sleep before firing it into the roof of the net.

Mostly I am thinking of Michael Olise’s bicycle kick in France’s game against Sweden in the Round of 32. The ball popped up high at the top of the box, and in a sudden blur of movement, he was wheeling his boot over his head, his hips torquing miraculously through the air, smashing the ball against the post. It was an outrageous attempt, an angry outburst of volcanic power tempered by effervescent grace. 

It’s destined to join the canon of famous World Cup missed chances, such as Pelé’s “most magnificent dummy” in 1970 and Andrea Pirlo’s dark-magic free kick against England in 2014. What I appreciate about such moments is their aesthetic imperfection, their evocation of what might have been — a bit like life itself, which almost always leaves us wanting something more.

As far as soccer goes, though, the World Cup has given us more than enough. And it all rests on a mountain of money, no small amount of which was obtained through unsavory means. We like to think that corruption stops at the edge of the brightly lit field, that the darkness surrounding it is held back by the stadium’s clean, sweeping lines. But even the best goal you witnessed in this tournament is tainted. As Trump has known all along, it turns out corruption is a lot of fun.