Body-text fonts, pt. 53: Equity

… which is Matthew Butterick’s update of the classic Ehrhardt typeface.

Equity (darker version; lighter version) is excellent – and underused. I’ve seen it “out in the wild” only in books by Butterick or by his enthusiasts: e.g., Bryan A. Garner’s Legal Writing in Plain English.

(Of course, Ehrhardt already is good enough for most uses. Perhaps Equity is superfluous.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Equity is this month’s featured font because private equity is in the soccer news. Infantino is trying to make room for investors – Trump associates! – to buy a substantial share in FIFA’s tournaments.

Some FIFA member nations expect to benefit from the deal. Others – those that have no trouble paying for their soccer operations – staunchly oppose ceding business control to outsiders.

The European nations have resolved, unanimously, to boycott all FIFA competitions unless Infantino’s proposal is withdrawn or voted down.

I hope they get their way – without the boycott. I am not taken with Europe’s “principles.” Europe has a long history of thinking itself too good to play with anybody else.

Tim Vickery, in this video, explains:

Vickery’s diagnosis and proposal are very nearly my own, and so I’ll leave the matter there. But this is not to treat it lightly. The World Cup’s continuance is in danger.

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

P.S. Tens of thousands of Moroccans illegally crossed into the tiny Spanish semi-exclave of Ceuta yesterday. Spain and Morocco, along with four other countries, are slated to host the 2030 World Cup together.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 101: The Big Green

I try not to review bad movies. If I watch a movie and don’t admire or enjoy it, I don’t review it. The Big Green (1995) is an exception.

I chose it because I have just finished watching the World Cup.

(Alas, I’d forgotten that the conclusion of Captain Tsubasa, a.k.a. Supercampeones, was released in 1995.)

Having written the review, though, I wonder if The Big Green might not be as bad as all that.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Roger Ebert didn’t care for The Big Green. His review bemoans its triteness.

A team of small-town misfits are inspired by their offbeat coach to master a sport. They start out incredibly bad. They are humiliated by the ace team from the big city, with the expensive black uniforms and the obsessive coach. Then they start getting better. No prizes for who wins their big rematch. … Why soccer? Because their teacher is from England, and is visiting tiny Elma, Texas, on an exchange program. … Under the influence of this inspirational teacher and the discipline of the sport, [the youngsters] transform themselves. This will come as a shock to anyone who has not seen Dangerous Minds, The Dead Poets Society, and the countless other homages to the same idea.

Of course, some such “homages” – Hoosiers, notably – are not bad movies. It helps when the story is traceable to something that actually happened. This imposes constraints of accuracy – or, at least, of plausibility.

Plausibility is not the aim of The Big Green. Many of its elements are unabashedly fanciful. For example, racial groups from every major landmass but Australia and Antarctica are represented in the little Texas town, although the population is low enough that the schoolhouse has just one room.

But let us grant that diversity and inclusion, no matter how unlikely in a given location, befit an idealized tale of the global game.

It’s still important that characters be compelling individuals.

Alas, the individual children in The Big Green are stock figures with particularly unappealing traits. These range from cloying cuteness to frightening psychosis to clichéd hardbittenness.

The runtiest boy is recognizable as Alfalfa from the previous year’s Little Rascals movie. (The Big Green has improved his hairdo.) This lad shows no aptitude for soccer but nonetheless is chosen to take the decisive penalty kick.

Meanwhile, the boy who tends goal – Patrick Renna, reprising his “fat kid” role from The Sandlot – hallucinates that the opponents are ninjas, pirates, knights on horseback, etc.

He copes by redirecting his hallucinations into a productive channel.

Finally, the “tough” girl’s father is a drunkard. (Recall, from Hoosiers, the Dennis Hopper character.) This is the movie’s sole attempt to provide background detail for any of the children.

No, that’s not quite right. A new boy’s reason for coming to the town is withheld during most of the movie; then, near the end, it is revealed. This gets the plot over the hump.

The grownup characters fare better.

The most conspicuous local grownup is a none-too-zealous sheriff’s deputy (Steve Guttenberg). He is serviceably obnoxious as the love interest of the new teacher-coach.

About that teacher-coach, then – the genre’s central figure. This particular coach is an odd duck. It’s traditional for these movies to identify the coach’s personal demons. Happily, Miss Montgomery appears to have none.

She’s played by the fresh-faced Olivia d’Abo, the 1980s and ’90s equivalent of Felicity Jones.

It is Miss Montgomery’s mission to bring British jollity to disaffected U.S. youth.

MISS MONTGOMERY

I believe that you’re all special because you live here in America, and America is a place where you can be anything you want to be.

THE FAT KID

I think that was before Reaganomics, Ma’am.

(Not bad, kid.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve been treating The Big Green as a genre piece, transposed, awkwardly, into a comedic and fantastical key. But I believe that despite its perfunctoriness about the sport itself – the gameplay is wholly unbelievable – the movie does capture various Hoosiers-style social truths.

Children and youths in mid-’90s U.S. prairie towns really were this jaded (or worse). I know because, in 1996, I went to school in rural Missouri.

Soccer really was viewed as a curiosity there. My classmates knew more about The Big Green than about the 1994 U.S. World Cup.

The movie is correct that pickup soccer didn’t exist in such places, and that the only way to play was to join an urban or suburban league. This still is the case. Millions of U.S. children have no access to the world’s game. The harvest is ready but there are too few Miss Montgomeries; and, if there were more, their efforts would be appropriated by the pay-to-play industry. Indeed, this is what appears to happen in The Big Green.

The movie is correct, or nearly so, that ultra-competitive coaches of the city youth leagues pace the sidelines shouting through bullhorns, brandishing swords, and leching after any Miss Montgomeries who cross paths with them.

COACH HUFFER
[Jay O. Sanders]

You know, we have a little tradition down here among the coaches. Before the final game, we always make a little wager.

MISS MONTGOMERY

Really? What are we betting?

COACH HUFFER

Well, now, I couldn’t take your money from you, but, you know, I’m divorced. I wouldn’t say no to a kiss.

MISS MONTGOMERY

Deal. But if you lose, you have to kiss our mascot, Ernie. He’s that lovely little green goat over there. He’s divorced, too.

(My favorite line. All right, the movie has some charm.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Perhaps the oddest and, to me, most intriguing thing about The Big Green is that its skies are so dreary. Indeed, all the lighting is rather dim. (The poster misleads.) The story is hokey nonsense. Why not prettify the visuals, then? Would it have been too costly? Or could it be that behind the story lurks a somber attitude? Hoosiers, which takes place during the winter, is awash with radiant color; but then, Hoosiers is uplifting. Nothing about The Big Green is; not really. The cheerful Miss Montgomery is not inspiring so much as freakishly out of place.

J. L. Carr wrote a novel, The Battle of Pollocks Crossing (online here), about an English schoolmaster who accepts a temporary job at a school in rural South Dakota. The Booker judges shortlisted the novel. I doubt anybody reads it nowadays.

It’s supposed to be a quirky story. The schoolmaster involves himself in some sort of campaign, on behalf of the “Have-Nots,” against the “Haves.” Farce ensues. The resolution is perhaps less than triumphant. (Bear in mind, I haven’t actually read the book.)

The sky of the book’s cover looks a lot like the sky of The Big Green.

My own fanciful idea, almost certainly false, is that someone set out to turn this oddity into a movie. The script was fed through different writers’ groups. The profit motive was accorded too much weight. Eventually, only the barest outline of the original tale remained. The U.S. World Cup was approaching, and so soccer was grafted onto the story as an afterthought – or perhaps as a vestige of fidelity to Carr (who also wrote a soccer novel, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup).

If anyone wants to buy Pollocks Crossing for me, I’ll gladly read it and report whether this daydream is true.

“Bad” and “good” guys

Bots must have read my previous entry and decided that I would approve of this Substack post: it has come up a few times in my feed (in Spanish, more often than not). The post is by one Éamann Mac Donnchada, “an Irishman resident in Barcelona, deeply marked by his years in Argentina.”

Indeed, I found it moving.

(See also this post of Mac Donnchada’s, written before the final.)

Mac Donnchada offers a nice counterpoint to what I have been reading and viewing elsewhere. For example, the Guardian – don’t think it doesn’t have an axe to grind! – would have us believe that Argentinians are morally undeserving, as indicated by the fact that some U.S. Blacks and some non-Argentinian Latin Americans prefer not to cheer for Argentina.

(The piece on Latin America begins, amusingly, with a Brazilian – a citizen of Argentina’s chief sporting rival – saying, I *would* cheer for Argentina, *but* … )

Of course, I can’t speak for – or to – everyone belonging to these groups. But the obvious rejoinder to the argument is: Look closely at Spain. Look closely at Europe. Look at their histories and their present attitudes (which are cosmeticized, as Mac Donnchada notes). Are the Argentinians really so much worse?

As Mac Donnchada remarks:

Football has acted as a socially acceptable pretext for saying things that would have been unacceptable in any other context. National sporting rivalry has licensed people to express prejudices that normally remain hidden behind progressive language.

To wit, prejudices against Argentinians.

Which isn’t to say that Argentinians aren’t themselves prejudiced. But it does shed light on the team’s conduct. When the Argentinian players turned their backs on Spain’s post-game celebration, it may not have been entirely a matter of bad sportsmanship. It may also have been a refusal to applaud a country where Argentinians suffer prejudice.

(Argentinians often are bad losers; I’ve seen Ecuador beat them enough times to know that. 😆 Even so, I’ve noticed that Argentinians tend, after the obligatory period of fisticuffs and grousing, to bestow grudging respect.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Politics aside, the more I think about the final, the less convinced I am that Spain dominated Argentina as thoroughly as it seemed. Yes, the stats – possession, passing, shooting, etc. – favor Spain; but how were those figures achieved? As Hannah Frye explains, in tennis, the scoring system allows the side that returns service just a little better to tally many more games and sets. Soccer is thought to exhibit the opposite tendency – goals are not predictable amplifications of modest superiority – but, as every devoted viewer understands, the focus on goals is misleading. It’s other metrics that predictably get amplified. The Spanish were able to record better numbers, and to look vastly superior, by repeatedly exploiting a single weakness that the Argentinians were aware of but almost powerless to correct. The Spanish understood that the Argentinians were too old and tired to effectively press Spain’s back line. (This was evident as early as Argentina’s match against Cape Verde.) This allowed the Spanish to constantly advance their teenaged central defender, Cubarsí, into the midfield; and the resulting numerical advantage in that sector allowed them to control possession. Yes, the Spanish are good at passing and recovering; but are they so much better than these same Argentinians who, four years earlier, overran the French? The answer is: Yes, with more youthfulness and rest and an extra player in the middle. That’s all we really can tell. The Argentinians, of course, knew that they were being made to look inept. And they knew how. Their response was logical. Fernández occasionally would leave his place in the middle and join the front press – not to generate turnovers but to “persuade” Cubarsí to retreat. It was desperate but necessary, and it resulted in Fernández’s expulsion. It was an altogether more proactive gambit than, e.g., England’s total retreat into the box.

Hannah Frye: “The resilience to losing that you have to have [in tennis] is, I think, unlike any other.”

But much the same could be said about Argentina in this final. The team showed more resilience than any other I can think of, despite the humiliating amplification, all over the field, of the failure of the press. The Argentinians were so resilient, they almost won. The Spanish, for all their “dominance,” almost didn’t. This was no 2009 Champions League final, no low-scoring affair with an outcome nonetheless settled early; this was a live contest until the end. The Spanish never did pass all the way through Argentina: they hoofed a ball into the box, where a couple of fresh substitutes got to it first. (And yes, the earlier goal’s disallowal was correct.)

There was, then, a certain reactiveness to Spain’s game, a certain fundamental preoccupation with the opponent rather than with proactive excellence (e.g., the Spanish were in no hurry to obtain a lead). And, I daresay, a certain smugness. I’m reminded of a story of my Uncle John’s. The classical guitarist, Andrés Segovia, once listened to an earnest amateur’s performance. He then took the guitar and played it back, cruelly replicating each mistake. What is an opponent to do in the face of a virtuoso’s calculated meanness? I don’t say that Spain played as cruelly as Segovia. But it was a virtuoso one-trick performance. Spain could have tried different things but didn’t – until the end. Then the ball simply was hoofed into the box. Argentina tried more things. (It’s a mistake to claim the opposite.) None worked. That’s all.

Let me end with a quotation from a different Spanish youngster: Gavi, who took a few knocks after the final whistle.

No, to be honest, I don’t think [the Argentinians] should be suspended. I realize it doesn’t set a good example for the children, but there’s also that side to football that’s a bit more violent.

He’s magnanimous because he’s young, the pundits say. Perhaps. Or perhaps Gavi is wise enough to put himself in the other’s place. Or perhaps he’s not especially proud of how Spain approached the game. That’s not to say he should be ashamed. You play the way you know; you try to win the way you can.

Postmortem

The World Cup has ended. I congratulate the Spanish. They are deserving champions. If I never see another World Cup, I won’t regret having seen Spain win last.

I also hugely admire the Argentinians. Outclassed, they came close to winning through sheer determination. They were the tournament’s most antagonistic team – and, from the competitiveness-prizing point of view, its finest.

After the final, Western European pundits tarred the Argentinians – and, alas, all South Americans – as violent and uncouth. The good guys won, the bad guys lost, was the pundits’ gloat. Football was saved. Even supposing it were true, the self-righteousness astounds. Europeans also misbehave. Harald Schumacher, Zinedine Zidane, and Sergio Ramos all played more despicably, for all the world to see, than any Argentinian did in this tournament. Italian squads have been as defensive as Argentina, and as petulant. The Dutch of the 2010 final, and the Dutch and Portuguese in their notorious match of 2006, were shockingly, comically violent. (The English – poor people – have mostly just harmed themselves.)

I also recall that many pundits – not French ones, of course – worshipped these same “uncouth” Argentinian players when they won in 2022. I suppose that like most people, pundits are knee-jerk home supporters first, rival haters second, victory worshippers third, and objective judges fourth; and, all the while, hypocrites.

A more respectful and realistic European is Tim Vickery; he points out that Argentina’s initial strategy was not just to defend and foul. (Ignore the other pundit.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Organization-wise, the tournament is broken. There are too many games. Temperatures are miserable. Players look tired. Distances between host cities are too great. Tickets are too costly. Price-gouging for amenities is unrestrained. Refereeing isn’t credible. Political interference by the hosts, once deemed unacceptable, has become the norm.

Only four years ago, this still was the most watchable event in sports. Say what you will about how Qatar prepared, the spectacle was lovely.

This time, I just wanted it all to end.

The 2030 World Cup will be held in six countries, including Spain and Argentina, and on three continents. The number of teams may be raised.

It is rumored that the USA will bid for the World Cup of 2038.

The best players, managers, referee, goal, and games of this World Cup

Bear in mind, the final has not been played.

(I’ve italicized the Best XI.)

Front-line players: Mbappé (France), Haaland (Norway), Kane (England), Messi (Argentina).

Midfielders: Ødegaard (Norway), Bellingham (England), Fernández (Argentina), Rodri (Spain), Xhaka (Switzerland), Ruiz (Spain), Tielemans (Belgium), Olmo (Spain).

Defenders: Cucurella (Spain), Mazraoui (Morocco), Laporte (Spain), Lisandro Martínez (Argentina), Akanji (Switzerland), Lucumí (Colombia), Muñoz (Colombia), Porro (Spain).

Goalkeepers: Bounou (Morocco), Nyland (Norway), Emiliano Martínez (Argentina), Pickford (England).

(English journalists have been savaging Pickford for letting in two goals that weren’t his fault. All the more reason to choose him.)

Most valuable player: Messi.

Best-all-around player: Bellingham.

Outstanding old player: Messi (39).

Outstanding young player: Bouaddi (Morocco) (18).

Outstanding substitutes: Lukaku (Belgium), Lautaro Martínez (Argentina), Quintero (Colombia).

Best managers: De la Fuente (Spain), Scaloni (Argentina).

Best referee: Barton (El Salvador), especially for Türkiye vs. Paraguay …

… and for France vs. Spain.

(The final will be refereed by Vinčić, the Slovenian. I thought him too generous toward Mexico; Argentina will eat him alive.)

Best goal: Kane’s second versus the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Best games: Türkiye vs. Paraguay; Ecuador vs. Germany; Netherlands vs. Morocco; USA vs. Belgium; Norway vs. Brazil; Mexico vs. England; France vs. Spain; and every knockout contest involving Argentina (may the final be the same).

Semifinals: France 0, Spain 2; England 1, Argentina 2

Which manager was worse?

(I) Thomas Tuchel, for:

(a) ceasing to attack …

and

(b) permitting Messi & Co. to hammer away at the English goal …

for forty minutes;

OR:

(II) Didier Deschamps, for:

having no response for anything that Spain did.

I vote: Deschamps. This is the second time he has “crashed the Ferrari” in the World Cup. (I’m not considering France’s Euro defeats.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Deschamps almost “crashed the Ferrari” in the 2018 World Cup final. The Croatians were passing through the French at will, and had scored once. But then the referee gave France a second goal.

Deschamps’s tactics with France always have been simple.

(1) He fields three or four prodigious scorers – even if they don’t maintain possession, defend, etc. He values their scoring so much that he requires little else of them.

(2) He overpopulates the defense. He prefers central midfielders and fullbacks who are defensive specialists. (That is putting it kindly; at times, he seems to prefer that they have offensive limitations.)

(3) He ignores transitional midfield play. He figures that as long as (a) his attackers seize on mistakes and put in goals and (b) his defensive multitudes keep goals out, the middle of the field doesn’t matter.

In short, he gambles on offensive talent, which of course France has in spades.

Well, these tendencies bit him in 2022, against Argentina, and again in this tournament, against Spain. The vaunted attackers weren’t outplayed, exactly. Rather, the opposing midfielders cut off their supply. I had expected that Mbappé, Dembélé, et al. should have enough chances provided them. Everyone expected this. Instead, they were starved. Rodri, Ruiz, and Olmo – great players – bossed the middle. But they were aided by Deschamps’s abdication of that zone.

Halfway through, it was clear that France sorely missed the few polyfunctional midfielders employed during Deschamps’s tenure:

• Griezzman, an attacker willing to drop back to defend and to build up play. (Retired.)
• Kanté, ball-winner extraordinaire, known also for jump-starting the attack. (Old; languishing on the bench.)
• Camavinga. (Left at home.)

(Moussa Sissoko was discarded after featuring in the 2016 Euros; Steven Nzonzi was a bit-player in 2018; Manu Koné, in this World Cup, has been an occasional substitute for the not-fully-fit, defensively-minded Tchouaméni. These are versatile players that, at different times, Deschamps has not preferred to use.)

I said, at the beginning of the tournament, that the French could win any match with just twenty good minutes. Spain granted five. By then, for France, it was too late.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Spain’s midfield is tactically and technically superb; but so is Argentina’s. And Argentina has grit, grit, grit. Only the Croatians approximate them. This should be a fascinating final. I’ll bet on Argentina; these Spaniards have yet to meet such willful adversaries. But I wouldn’t mind if Spain won. Both these teams are worthy.

I’m afraid that this is just not your day, my friend

CLOUSEAU

I’m afraid that this is just not your day, my friend.

DREYFUS

But it is my day. It is, my friend. After three long, terrible years, it is at last my day. I will not permit, repeat, not permit anything – repeat, anything – to spoil it. Now, I will walk you to the gate, and I will kiss you goodbye –

[He kisses CLOUSEAU’S cheeks]

– and you will drive off in your new car – which should rightfully be mine – and I will have my interview with the Sanity Commission, and they will set me free. And then: I will kill you!

[Chasing]

Kill you!

CLOUSEAU
[Fleeing]

François!

DREYFUS

Kill you!

CLOUSEAU

Start the car!

DREYFUS

Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill you!

[Restrained by sanitorium guards]

I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him! Let me go. … Ha, ha, ha! I want to kill him.

(The Pink Panther Strikes Again)

July’s poem

This poem is for the eliminated World Cup teams. The thing about international soccer is, you can’t just go out and buy the crucial missing pieces. You make do with what you have. (But if you’re France, you’ve already “imported” so many pieces that everybody else is scrambling for your castoffs.)

It’s demoralizing knowing that, however well you use what you have, you or whoever beats you will eventually surrender to France.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,

For want of a shoe the horse was lost,

For want of a horse the rider was lost,

For want of a rider the battle was lost,

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost –

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(From The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, edited by Iona & Peter Opie. Recited, in The Clocks, by Hercule Poirot. Previous versions due to: Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack; the poet George Herbert; the Germans; and the French.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Is the “want of a horseshoe nail” an “INUS” condition? (That is: an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition; in ordinary English: a cause. See: J. L. Mackie.)

Losing the battle might suffice for losing the kingdom, even if the kingdom could be lost in other ways: e.g., due to a meteor strike.

Losing the rider might suffice for losing the battle, even if the battle could be lost in other ways: e.g., due to a meteor strike.

And so on, for each preceding line. (Let’s say the meteorite gets smaller and smaller.)

Or is causation better analyzed in some other way? I’m getting too old for this.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Q: What was the “horseshoe nail” that Ecuador wanted?

A: Goals. And (controversially), according to some journalists, avoiding getting death threats from Mexican cartels.

Canada 0, Morocco 3; Mexico 2, England 3; USA 1, Belgium 4

So, the co-hosts of this rotten World Cup have been eliminated, pop-pop-pop, in the same early knockout round, and I couldn’t be more pleased; I’ve waited eight years for this moment. Canada, I fault only for having joined a corrupt alliance. (I didn’t much like how the Canadian team played, but put let’s put that aside.) Mexico, I fault for having long ago entered into faustian hosting arrangements with the United States, in this World Cup and in other tournaments; for having greedily sought to host the World Cup a third time, ahead of countries that haven’t had a turn; and for gross inhospitality. All of Ecuador cheered when England beat Mexico. I certainly did, even though I cheer for England as little as possible (just three times since the 1998 World Cup).

As for the USA, well, it may not be gracious to “pile on,” but certain matters must be addressed. If you don’t know the immediate context, you can read about it here or in countless other sources.

Know this, at least: a certain U.S. politician admitted – bragged – that he’d interfered in a supposedly neutral disciplinary process.

As it turned out, the meddling hurt rather than helped the intended beneficiary. The U.S. team already was out of sorts when it took to the field against the Belgians. Those opponents carved up the U.S. with professional, surgical precision – until the last minutes, when the ball was trickling into the U.S. goal every which way; then, they unleashed the “Trump” dance.

It’s gratifying to see on-field retribution. But the urgent lesson is that stricter and more explicit rules against political interference must be adopted, or else matches themselves will lose whatever credibility they once had. (Today, undue controversy surrounded Argentina’s victory over Egypt.)

Moreover: in a better world, certain FIFA officials would be impeached. And a certain country would be barred from the World Cup, for at least as long as the Chileans were barred in the early 1990s for their procedural violation.

It might be objected that in the present case, the politician’s meddling backfired, and so no harm was done. I couldn’t disagree more. A legal analogy: specific instances of bribery, intimidation, or jury tampering might backfire; but they should be punished anyway, because such offenses corrode the integrity and the trustworthiness of the court.

Mexico 2, Ecuador 0; Portugal 2, Croatia 1; predictions

Still he was a pius man in his way and found relief in prayer.

(Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters)

We lost because Mexico was the home team. It pretty much boils down to that.

Mexico shouldn’t have hosted this tournament, but that’s a topic for another day.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

To my dismay, I’ve been driven very close to embracing a conspiracy theory.

Not because Ecuador lost, but because of how Portugal beat Croatia. A penalty kick was bogusly awarded to the Portuguese; later, Croatia’s tying goal was disallowed due to a tiny spike on a chart. The spike indicated an otherwise undetectable touch registered by a chip inside the ball.

Not even video review could corroborate it.

It’s not that I don’t believe the technology works. It’s that I’m not convinced that this chart isn’t a fabrication.

(It doesn’t help that this technology’s only other beneficiary has been Real Madrid, for a notorious judgment that decided a Champions League series.)

Or, to retreat just a little, a Croatian who chose to doubt the chart would be within his rights.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Enough lamenting (for now). These are my predictions for the rest of the tournament (see the bracket). I may revise them after the round of 16, should Spain lose to Portugal, Norway to Brazil, or Colombia to Switzerland.

The Belgium/​USA match is hard to predict, too, but its winner shouldn’t last longer than one more round.

Morocco over Canada

France over Paraguay

Belgium over the USA

Spain over Portugal

Norway over Brazil

Mexico (at home again) over England

Colombia over Switzerland

Argentina over Egypt

France over Morocco

Spain over Belgium

Norway (unless undone by Miami’s heat) over Mexico (no longer at home)

Colombia over tired-looking Argentina

France over Spain

Colombia over Norway

Spain over Norway (or vice versa; it’s just a consolation match)

France over Colombia