Many South Asian football fans started the morning of the second Saturday during the World Cup with two back-to-back matches. The first saw Brazil, having shaken off their troubles to emerge with a good point against Morocco, face a Haitian side many consider one of the weakest in the tournament.
The second saw Paraguay, reeling with the bruises from a four-goal capitulation against hosts USA, taking on a Turkey side, which had raised expectations before the tournament, only to lose the first game against Australia in a manner familiar by now.
The two matches followed entirely different trajectories. But intriguingly, there was a convergence. The man who had redeemed the first game indirectly helped turn the second into a far more compelling drama than it already was.
Vinicius Jr. has seen intense hatred, of a racist nature, up very, very close. And such hatred does not emanate just from the rogues at the fringes of the stadium. The culture of victim-blaming and couching incidents of racism in the language of controversy has strong institutional roots. Vinicius has not been a coy and mild-mannered recipient of hate, and that has only aggravated the abuses against him.
Despite being a victim of racism so often and taking the all too important step of calling it out repeatedly, alongside being the wonderful football player he is, he rarely enjoys any kind of universal appreciation.
His status as one of the best-paid players in a super-club like Real Madrid does somewhat explain why such appreciation is rare, but it still puzzles me because Vinicius Jr. has now twice, four years apart, done that one thing which has been the surest way of attaining universal appreciation in football: turning up to a World Cup in style.
This game against Haiti will hardly feature in conversations about Vini’s best World Cup game, mainly because of how utterly one-sided this match has been. But he is the sole reason I will remember watching this game.
As a unit, Brazil looked quite mediocre and uninteresting. The second half had the air of formality. Haiti defended well enough against a Brazil side that seemed to have checked out of the game.
But Brazil could afford to check out because they were 3-0 up, and Vinicius Jr. contributed heavily to all three. It was a rebound of his shot that Cunha turned in to score the opening goal. It was Vinicius who carried the ball from his own half and, with a gorgeous pass, caught Haitian Defender Ricardo Ade flat-footed and literally floored.
Cunha expertly provided the finish to the pass to double the lead. At the dying moments of the first half, Vinicius ran on to a long ball and converted clinically to round off his display. Brazil bagged three easy points, but doubts will linger about their prospects of a deep World Cup run, and Raphinha being forced off injured further compounds matters.
It was already a poignant piece of narrative that on the date of Juneteenth, a figure like Vinicius dropped such a performance in the city of Frances Harper, playing for a country which has its own complicated and horrifying history of slavery against the country born out of a successful revolution that created the first post-colonial independent state of people of colour.
But the narrative did go further, if only tangentially, as the following match in San Francisco saw a red card brandished against Miguel Almiron for covering his face during an altercation.
This piece of football legislation has been very recently introduced to ensure that no one can turn an event of derogatory or discriminatory on-field comment into a perverse social experiment of plausible deniability, as had happened when Vinicius claimed he had been racially abused by a Benfica player.
Almiron’s sending off, a first high-profile red card for this specific transgression, turned the story of Paraguay in this match from one about plucky underdogs to heroic ones.
Paraguay had started the game with a bang. Galarza scored the earliest goal of the tournament yet when the clock had just crossed a minute. It was a beautifully executed shot from twenty-five yards out that nestled into the bottom corner.
Paraguay, known for their determined defending, scored a little too early, and now they would have to defend a slender lead for basically the entire game. Such a setting suits them, and it became a nightmare for Turkey.
Nightmare, not because Turkey was being outplayed. Far from that. Nightmare because their superiority was obvious everywhere except the only place where it mattered, the scoreline. Chance after chance went begging. Shot after shot went wide.
The names of Arda Guler, Calhanoglu, Kenan Yildiz, Deniz Gul, Mert Muldur and so on kept being chanted in bated breath by commentators anticipating a Turkish breakthrough, but it would all be for nothing.
Almiron’s red card had the effect of extinguishing any doubt regarding how the rest of the game was going to be played out. When it is 11 vs 11, a 1-0 lead needs defending, but there is also a temptation to double it and an assurance that the lead can be reclaimed if lost.
When it is 10 vs 11, the sole objective becomes protecting the lead. Paraguay managed to do that, relatively keeping their cool in a game that not too infrequently bubbled up with hostile coming-togethers and heated exchanges. Their hopes of qualifying to the knock-outs are well alive.
It was not easy for Paraguay, but it could have been far more difficult if more Turkish shots had been on target. Turkey had 32 shots. 27 of those shots were off target. They created as many as 5 big chances for Paraguay’s 0.
One could dismiss this as a statistical accident if Turkey hadn’t developed a recent history of such disappointment. In their two matches in this tournament, Turkey has had 62 shots in total.
They are yet to score. They have only one game left in this World Cup, against an in-form USA, before they head home having been dumped out of the group stages in their first World Cup in 24 years.
Read more – World Cup Day 9: USA Through, Turkey Out, and Morocco’s 70-Second Stunner
Also see – Champions Arsenal play Coventry in Premier League opener
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