Germany's Resurrection: Undav Writes the Latest Chapter
A 2-1 comeback, a place in the knockout rounds, and a German squad that suddenly looks like something worth fearing.
There is a particular kind of football that happens only at this tournament — the kind where a team looks finished, looks exposed, looks like everything the critics have been saying about them for three years is finally being confirmed on the largest stage on earth, and then a substitute walks off the bench and rewrites the entire story in twelve minutes.
Deniz Undav did exactly that in Toronto. Germany were a goal down to Ivory Coast, a side that had come to this World Cup with pace and belief and the quiet conviction that the old European powers were more myth than muscle. For long stretches of that match, they were right. Then Undav arrived — and then, in injury time, he arrived again. A 2-1 comeback, a place in the knockout rounds, and a German squad that suddenly looks like something worth fearing.
This is what the 2026 group stage has been teaching anyone willing to pay attention: the match is not over when you think it is. The surge in late goals that statisticians are cataloguing has a simple explanation beneath all the tactical analysis about stoppage time and hydration breaks. Forty-eight teams, many of them facing elimination, all of them aware that ninety minutes now comes with ten or twelve minutes of genuine football attached. Desperation is the best creative force in sport. It always has been.
The Netherlands offered a different lesson entirely — the lesson of controlled destruction. Brian Brobbey and Cody Gakpo scored twice each in Houston as Sweden were swept aside 5-1, a scoreline that felt less like a result and more like a statement of intent. The Dutch have something this tournament, a collective fluency that suggests their individual talents have found a common language. Five-one is not a scoreline you produce by accident.
Three teams have already been eliminated under FIFA's revised format — sent home before the knockout phase has even announced itself properly. In a 48-team tournament, that arithmetic carries a certain cruelty. You cross an ocean, you carry a nation's expectations through security at the airport, and two group matches later you are watching someone else's tournament from a hotel bar. Football has always been this: the gap between what you hoped and what happened, measured in goals and minutes.
The dog called Bug — a Brussels Griffon with an Instagram following and an apparently genuine gift for prediction — correctly forecast England's 4-2 win over Croatia. I mention this not because it matters, but because it is the 2026 World Cup distilled to its essence: a story so large it has room for everything, the sublime and the ridiculous coexisting without apology, each somehow making the other more real.
Germany are through. The Netherlands are flying. Three nations are going home. The tournament is alive.
