A Day Without Soccer
A moment of reflection before the World Cup quarterfinals.
Funny Games is a limited-event series both about the World Cup and not. This is a tender look at the last month from our little corner of Los Angeles to yours.
It is the first day in twenty-seven without soccer. You’re up before dawn to water the garden growing. The air is clearer than it was a few weeks ago, but the Boyle Heights fire is marked in the soil and in the plants that rise from it. You should strip away contaminated topsoil, water gently, cap beds with clean mulch or straw, and avoid leaf blowers that can spread hazardous particles, they say.
The first rays of the sun peek over the San Gabriels, threatening heat, but not quite yet. There is life here before the day.
Admiring the Charming centaury (Zeltnera venusta), an annual herb endemic to California, you notice the corkscrew-shaped stamens, visions of England tightening the screw on Mexico. The wound is still fresh, a bright magenta flash. Remember the single, conciliatory firework on Figueroa dirge.
Bees begin to buzz throughout the garden like bots on the dead internet. There is a wide variety of solitary and social pollinators in Los Angeles, each carefully rehearsed—from European honey bees to massive Valley carpenter bees to striking metallic-green sweat bees. The honey bees have traded their banded stripes for vertical sky blue and white, say Argentina’s was the greatest comeback in World Cup history, cry more; the carpenter bees have burrowed deep into Mo Salah’s shoulder, feel Egypt’s stinging loss, know the fix is in; while the sweat bees think England will win it all.
The zucchinis this year are bigger than any family member at birth, announcing themselves with the courage of Cape Verde. The tomatoes are so bright and full of life, smiling and laughing like Lamine Yamal and his little brother Keyne.
You take several meetings with the air conditioner’s languid hum and cut into a Weiser Family Farms Bonny melon to pass the afternoon. It’s beginning to feel like Christmas morning after all the presents have been opened.
The fridge door is full of the Mbappé special. For example, nothing. You finished the last dregs of R. O’Neill Latta Ssyr after the United States’ 4-1 loss to Belgium, those Red Devils! It dribbled down your chin like one of Balogun’s runs on goal, but disappeared faster than Christian Pulisic.
At the bus stop, you wonder whether Metro service will remain this frequent and reliable, hoping you’ll be carried off in a pink, FIFA-branded bus proclaiming We Are Los Angeles.
Two young boys leave the Rite Aid across the street with a smaller, deflated-looking Trionda. They’ll pass it in the park or rebound kicks off buildings in sneakers. Isn’t it beautiful? This game, the things this tournament inspires? It would be a perfect day for a scoop of Thrifty’s Chocolate Malted Crunch, but.
A murder of crows, then a pandemonium of wild parrots, fly overhead, squawking joyously. A colorful disorder—was there ever anything as exciting as seeing Algeria draw with Austria inside Clifton’s Cafeteria? Or waiting in line for Estrano Verano during Mexico v. Ecuador?
At the bar, all the televisions are showing the Dodgers. A couple you’ve never met asks the bartenders if the World Cup is on. It’s not. We’re in the lull of matches, the hosts long gone. Your new friends, like the editor who just started following soccer and had to learn about Alexi Lalas the hard way, the Tartan Army, or the nurse with the backpack full of AI-generated bumper stickers for each national team, are absent. Like Luka Modrić, you wonder if you’ll ever see them again.
Walking home with no new songs to sing, you hear coyotes in the hillside, howling, lurking in the penalty area, like Haaland, inevitable.
