CHICKENPIE.Breel Embolo took the ball on the half-turn six yards outside the box, took one touch to set himself, and took the second to curl it low past the outstretched left glove of the youngest son of one of the greatest goalkeepers who ever lived. Luca Zidane, twenty-six, had guessed correctly. He had guessed correctly and the ball had still passed him. The Emirates Park Vancouver crowd, which had spent ninety seconds building a noise, went silent for a beat that the television broadcast held, then produced a sound that was less like cheering and more like the noise a continent makes when it finally exhales. Switzerland were ahead against Algeria in the tenth minute of a knockout game. Switzerland had gone seven knockout games without winning one. Switzerland had last won a World Cup knockout match in 1938, which was three years before the last time Zidane senior lifted anything important and was sixty-eight years before Embolo was born in Yaoundé. Switzerland had waited eighty-eight years for a moment that lasts ninety minutes or one hundred and twenty or a penalty shootout, and they had ten minutes of it burned already.
The number did not arrive from a FIFA press release or from the post-match graphics package. The number arrived, instead, from every Swiss player who took the knee in the second minute of added time at the final whistle. The number arrived from Murat Yakin, the Swiss coach, who took both hands off his hips in the technical area and turned, very slowly, toward the bench with the posture of a man who has just been told he has been granted permission to stop holding his breath. The number arrived from Dan Ndoye, the Nottingham Forest winger, who took the second-half kick-off, ran thirty yards with the ball before he had to, and then finished a move that he had mostly improvised, slamming a low strike from the top of the box past the wrong-footed Zidane in the forty-sixth minute. The Emirates Park crowd, which had finally settled into its voice after Embolo's opener, produced a second sound that was louder than the first and was almost a relief. The score was 2-0. The game was, for Algeria, finished in everything but the final whistle.
First World Cup knockout win since 1938. — Sky Sports, on the moment the stadium exhaled
For Riyad Mahrez, the captain, the match was the end of a tournament and the end of a longer sentence. He is thirty-five. He came to North America for his fourth and possibly final major tournament. He came to North America as the most accomplished footballer of his country's professional era — a Champions League winner with Manchester City in 2023, an FA Cup winner at the same club, a Premier League winner who took the Algerian flag around the Etihad lap so often that the stewards began to time him on it. He came to North America as one of two or three players in this Algeria squad who had ever scored in a World Cup knockout match. He scored zero in Vancouver. He barely had a chance. Fabian Rieder, the Swiss substitute, nearly got a third goal in the eighty-first minute but missed a tap-in as the ball skirted the face of goal. Mahrez did not have a tap-in. Mahrez did not have a shot on target until the sixty-ninth minute, when a low drive from twenty-five yards dipped just wide of Yann Sommer's left post. It was the last thing Mahrez did at this World Cup. He took the captain's armband off his bicep and held it in his hands as he walked toward the touchline. The armband, by tradition and by FIFA protocol, is a thing the captain takes off when the match is over. Mahrez took his off early. Mahrez, more than any other player on the pitch, knew the match was over.
Sky Sports called it Switzerland's first knockout win in eighty-eight years. Reuters called it the moment the Swiss finally ended the part of their World Cup history that they had been pretending did not exist. The Athletic called it a controlled, professional performance by a team that had been waiting for someone to give them permission to be clinical. FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who was at the stadium for his second match of the day after watching Spain beat Austria in Inglewood, took a photo with the Swiss squad in the tunnel at full-time. Luca Zidane, twenty-six, walked off the pitch with his head down. Zidane senior, watching on television somewhere in France, would have known before his son did that the score would not change. There were thirty-seven minutes of regulation plus stoppage time. Switzerland did not need any of them. Ndoye's forty-sixth-minute goal had been the second time the Swiss had scored in a World Cup knockout match in the twenty-first century. They had waited almost twenty-five years for it. They had waited, depending on how you count, almost ninety for the result that came with it.
Switzerland are into the round of sixteen. They will play the winner of Colombia or Ghana, on a date and at a venue to be confirmed, back in Vancouver — the same stadium where they waited ninety minutes for the eighty-eighth year. The draw gave them a path that, on paper, is among the gentlest in the round of sixteen. The path did not feel gentle at the moment Mahrez took off the armband. The path did not feel gentle at the moment Embolo wheeled away after his tenth-minute strike and found no Swiss team-mate close enough to jump on. The path felt like the weight of every knockout exit since 1938, lifted in a single ninety-minute window by a half-turn, a finish, a tap-in, and a clean sheet from a goalkeeper who, on most nights, has to be the second-most-famous person in his own household. Mr. Chicken was there. He was in the lower-right corner of the Emirates Park, in a tiny red-and-white Swiss scarf. He was not the one who scored. He was not the one who guessed wrong. He was watching, like the rest of the footballing world, when a team that had been waiting for ninety years got the second the second they needed it. He was watching when Mahrez took off the armband three minutes early. He was watching when the scoreboard in the corner of the frame said SUI 2 ALG 0 and did not change again. He was watching, like all of us, when a tournament that had been waiting for a giant-killer got one — and got one without a giant being killed, just a giant being forced to walk home with a captain's armband in his hands instead of on his arm.
