Forty Years On: The Stage Still Belongs to the Underdogs

There is a moment at every World Cup when the tournament stops being a schedule and becomes a story. It happened on Monday, and it happened in the least expected place.

Cape Verde drew with Spain. Read that sentence again slowly, because Vozinha certainly did — he was too busy crying to move for several minutes after the final whistle. The goalkeeper is forty years old. Forty. He has been tending goal for a nation of half a million people, turning up, doing the work, carrying an entire footballing identity on his shoulders for long enough that most of his opponents were in primary school when he started. When Spain's equaliser came — and it came, because Spain always find a way — he still walked off the pitch having made history. The tears were not defeat. They were the weight of something that actually happened, finally, in front of the whole earth.

Saudi Arabia beat Uruguay. Iran came from behind twice to draw with New Zealand. This tournament has already decided it will not behave itself.

And yet the established powers are preparing to assert themselves. France face Senegal with Kante alongside them, and Olivier Giroud — a man who knows what a World Cup winner's medal feels like in your hand — has been telling anyone who'll listen that the little midfielder from Boulogne-sur-Mer is still the engine nobody can replace. Eight years ago Kante himself thought his international career was winding down. Now he runs through the midfield of a tournament like a man who has read something the rest of the players haven't. That is the thing about Kante: he never looks like he's working. He just looks like he arrived slightly before you did.

Norway and Erling Haaland enter the tournament against Iraq, and there is something almost philosophical about watching Haaland at a World Cup. The man scores goals the way other people breathe — involuntarily, continuously, with no apparent effort. Whether a tournament of this size can contain him or whether he'll simply continue being Erling Haaland regardless of context, we are about to find out.

Meanwhile Marcus Rashford watches from an uncertain distance. Barcelona chose not to trigger their purchase option. The England forward is at a World Cup representing a country while his club situation dissolves behind him. Rashford has always been a player about to become something definitive, perpetually on the edge of that transformation. The stage is here. The audience is the entire planet. History, at tournaments like this, has a way of forcing people to decide who they actually are.

Forty years of watching this competition has taught me one thing with absolute certainty: the script gets thrown away in the second week. But first, someone nobody expected has to cry on a pitch in America, and remind everyone why this matters.

The Vozinhas of the world carry the game on their backs. The rest of us are just watching.