Happy for Japan. Few teams would be so elated with a tie. They played hard for that!
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I’m happy for Japan too, but seeing all the joy of the thousands of netherland fans dancing behind the Orange bus makes me really want to go to a game.
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And then of course the Japanese fans cleaned up the stadium before leaving 
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Cape Verde!
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Poor Spain! They outshot CV 27-6 (7-1 shots on goal), outcornered them 11-1, and had 74% of possession… yet couldn’t manage to score. This is a shocking result.
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I attended a Holland match at a previous World Cup. Their energy is insane.
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I’m leaving the political parts out of this post (by Adam Kinzinger) but I absolutely loved this:
Then a soccer team from the North African nation of Algeria showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, and within a week the whole town was wearing green.
…The World Cup is here, 48 teams playing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Each team in the tournament picks a base camp, one town to live and train in between matches. Germany set up shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spain is training in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Algeria, playing two of its games up the road at Arrowhead, picked Lawrence and made it home for the summer.
What the people of Lawrence did with that is the part I can’t stop thinking about.
It started small, with a whole town of people who had never given Algeria much thought deciding, more or less overnight, that this was their team now. Flags went up in shop windows. Folks pulled on the green jerseys. People drove over just to catch a glimpse of the players. And then a local news crew stopped an older gentleman on a Lawrence sidewalk, standing in front of a storefront draped in a whole row of Algerian flags he had clearly just gone out of his way to find.
They asked him what he actually knew about the country whose colors he was flying. He grinned, paused for a beat, and said something along the lines of: not much yet — but we want to welcome you here. There is no agenda in that man. Nothing performative. Just a neighbor, thrilled to his bones that these strangers chose his town, and perfectly at ease with the fact that he has a lot left to learn about them.
The welcome only got bigger from there.
The University of Kansas, the state’s flagship school that calls Lawrence home, sent its marching band out to the training ground. They had spent the previous days learning Algeria’s national anthem, note for note, and they played it as the players walked out for practice. Think about what that means for a moment.
These men are thousands of miles from their families, living out of a hotel in the American Midwest, preparing for the biggest sporting event of their professional lives. And the first thing they hear when they step onto the grass is the sound of their own country’s song, played by a hundred American college kids in red and blue who learned it just for them. Several of the players stopped walking. A few of them looked like they weren’t sure what to do with themselves.
Algeria did its part, too. The team opened a training session to the public and spent the afternoon out on the grass with neighborhood kids, walking them through drills, signing autographs, posing for pictures. There are children from small-town America who are going to be telling the story of the day they trained with a World Cup team for the rest of their lives. And the Algerians have spent the last week calling themselves honorary Kansans, falling hard for a corner of a state most of them could not have found on a map two months ago.
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My daughter is volunteering for the World Cup. She got to go down to the pitch before the matches started.
She texted her dad tonight that she is attending a game next week. I suspect that tickets opened up, it’s not a popular matchup.
We were in Amsterdam during the last World Cup. Lots of orange jerseys and the bars were packed. Fun energy.
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The crowd noise behind Iran is kind of shocking and wonderful. (As someone of Iranian descent who grew up in the 1970s I wouldn’t have believed this would ever happen.) Helps that the game is in Los Angeles.
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Tear jerker. What a wonderful story. 
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I see on instagram my niece is at the Iran game in LA. Her family are big soccer fans. My niece has her own World Cup dreams so I’m sure she is feeling the excitement.
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Enjoyed Iran v New Zealand on tv, and a bit of (American Ninja Warrior in between). Look forward to Argentina’s match v Algerua tomorrow.
And France v Senegal.
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Love this story. This is the kind of diplomacy we need more of!
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This man is incredible. He was suppose to be present for the Congo game today but I am seeing some chatter otherwise that he might not be here today???
The fan stories for the World Cup - really, the HUMAN stories are just what I needed.
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Just to be clear, no matter what the media says, Boston isn’t out of beer. LOL!
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My H asked our nephew last night on our group chat if he had brought his kilt to wear today while in Boston, but we haven’t had a reply. Nephew is from Bermuda, but has a Scots father so he can drink 
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