GROUP B: Canada 1-1 Bosnia and Herzegovina
NOTE: ALL photos are from Sky Sports, you read the commentary HERE
There is a particular kind of cruelty football reserves for the team that does everything right except the one thing that counts. Canada spent ninety minutes in Toronto producing it in a laboratory.
The hosts had eight corners in the first half alone, the most by any side in a World Cup half since Belgium against the USA in 2014. They had sixty-six percent of the ball, twenty-one touches in the Bosnian box to their opponents’ seven, fifty-one completed passes in the final third to fifteen. And they had, at the break, exactly one shot on target. One. Bosnia had two, and one of them was in the net.
That goal told the story of the tournament so far. In Match Day One, Czechia struck from a long throw. Here, Bosnia struck from a corner: captain Sead Kolasinac, wearing the armband in place of the great Dzeko, flicked it on at the near post and Lukic had the simple task of nodding home on the line. Are we going to have a World Cup decided by set pieces? On this evidence, the underdogs certainly hope so. When you cannot win the football match, you win the dead ball.
And then Canada missed. And missed. And missed again. Jonathan David, home at his own World Cup after a barren year at Juventus that yielded eight goals in forty-six games, looked like a man wrestling a ghost. He snapped one straight at the keeper, tried an audacious bicycle kick, got in behind clean through only for his first touch, the most basic act in the game, to abandon him. Tani Oluwaseyi skied an open net from close range. Derek Cornelius headed a free one over. Canada were not so much wasteful as cursed.
Standing between them and the equaliser they deserved was Nikola Vasilj, who chose this night to play the game of his life. He saved, he parried, he swept off his line to beat a striker to a through ball and snuff out a penalty shout in the same motion. First word and last word were both his. If there was a man of the match, he was wearing gloves.
And in front of him, a wall with names and numbers: Muharemovic made nineteen clearances, Katic thirteen. Twice Bosnia hacked the ball off their own goal line, Kolasinac then Katic taking turns as last-ditch heroes. There is a fact worth keeping here: Kolasinac, the former Arsenal man, once worked as a nightclub bouncer to make ends meet at Schalke’s academy. Twenty years on he was still doing security, except the thing he kept out of the building was a Canadian equaliser. The bouncer, fittingly, was later booked-adjacent for time-wasting and pinged under football’s new five-second throw-in rule. Even the enforcer got enforced.
The watching Canadian celebrities did not enjoy it. Ryan Reynolds sat in the Toronto stands sweating, equal parts proud countryman and Wrexham talent scout. Mike Myers grimaced beside him, maybe not beside him but might as well be beside him. On this evidence Reynolds would have been wiser to scout the away end.
Then Jesse Marsch, aging on the touchline in real time, made the substitution that defined the match. He took off the haunted David and threw on fresh legs, among them a striker named, with no embellishment required, Promise. And on seventy-nine minutes it broke. Ismael Kone drove through the gears, Promise David produced a stunning flick, and Cyle Larin, on the pitch a matter of seconds, twisted and forced a deflected finish home. Lift off in Toronto.
So the omen delivered. Not the goal, the assist. Hope came on named Promise, and Promise kept it, with a touch rather than a finish. And the lesson of the night arrived with it: for an hour Canada had looked like a team that lived and died by Jonathan David, and then David walked off and the team scored anyway. Canada are more than Jonathan David.
What followed was theft in progress. Bosnia, legs gone, captain soon cramping and replaced to a chorus of boos, deployed the full survival toolkit: Muharemovic down and milking it, Katic chopping down Larin and taking the yellow without a flicker of regret. Six minutes of stoppage time became a hostage’s wait. Canada threw everyone forward. Larin had the winner on his boot at the death, and Bosnia, who had blocked all night, blocked one final time.
Full time, 1-1. A scoreline both teams carried to bed feeling completely opposite things about. Bosnia stole a point they would have wept for at kickoff. Canada dropped two they had earned ten times over. Same number on the board, two different worlds.
++++
Group D: USA 4-1 Paraguay
NOTE: ALL photos are from Sky Sports, you read the commentary HERE
They sent an astronaut to open it, well, you could say that, NO? Okay then. Katy Perry, back from the edge of space and apparently still reaching for stratospheres, stood at midfield in Los Angeles and sang for the home team before a ball was kicked. It set the register for the whole night perfectly: loud, a little ridiculous, unmistakably American. The hosts then went out and played like a country with something to prove on its own lawn.
There was a story in the team sheet before kickoff. At the last World Cup the United States went into battle with a centerback built like a Norse god, wait a minute, Zimmerman was not there. This time the back line leaned on Tim Ream, thirty-eight years old and entirely unbothered, marshalling the defense with the calm of a man who has seen every trick the game can throw and filed all of them under nuisance. ‘Uncle’ Ream, and he played like the oldest, wisest head on the pitch because he was.
What followed was the most complete USA performance in a generation, and it ran almost entirely through one man. Christian Pulisic was everywhere, the puppet master pulling every string in the final third, and he opened the scoring himself for 1-0. Captain America: the armband, the moment, the roar. From there the floodgates did what floodgates do. Weston McKennie, all engine and appetite, ran the midfield into the dirt on what looked like a diet of ranch dressing and pizza, finally the box-to-box menace the Americans always wanted him to be. The team looked strong, aggressive, and genuinely brave, pressing high and hunting in packs. That is my team, and they played like it.
The one blemish was the goal Paraguay pulled back, a reminder that no lead is furniture until the whistle. But the Americans answered every time, and the night turned into a hunt for a fourth that the football gods seemed personally determined to deny. Folarin Balogun came within a whisker of a brace, denied by inches, by woodwork, and by a keeper having the game of his life. The cursed fourth was waved off, blocked, scrambled clear, and ruled out by the narrowest of margins what felt like a dozen times. Paraguay, sensing a chance to steal a respectable scoreline, reached for the dark arts: the time-wasting, the tactical fouls, the theatrical collapses. None of it worked. Every trick met a referee unusually alert to it, as if there were an AI in the booth flagging the cons before they landed.
And then, at the death, the fourth finally came, and it came outrageously. Gio Reyna, on the pitch and itching, wrapped his foot around the ball and struck it with the outside of his boot, a worldie that bent away from the keeper and into the corner. 4-1. The kind of goal you only try when the result is safe and the swagger is fully restored.
Credit where it is due on the touchline. Mauricio Pochettino, The Pouch (I call him), out-thought his opposite number Gustavo Alfaro from first whistle to last, his substitutions sharpening the team rather than just settling it. He has the United States playing front-foot, fearless football at exactly the right time.
The stands were a Hollywood reel. Tom Cruise watched from the good seats with the Beckhams, and somewhere in the LA night the unmistakable profile of a certain Good-Looking Squidward, the former Canadian Prime Minister, taking in a tournament his own country is hosting a corner of. The celebrities came for a show. The United States gave them one.
Full time, 4-1. The best USA World Cup performance in living memory, on home soil, opened by an astronaut, or astro-not, I’m kidding! Okay hate me… and closed by an outside-of-the-boot worldie. If this is the level, the hosts are not here to make up the numbers. They are here to make a noise.