Morocco 1 – Netherlands 1 (Penalties 3-2)
June 30, 2026
By all accounts — well, by most accounts, after last night — I hate Cody Gakpo.
The Dutch soccer player plays his club ball for Liverpool, a rival to Arsenal, my team in the English Premier League. He’s a slender, drifty winger, the type who seems to float with the ball at his feet, and who often, to the delight of rival fans and the despair of Liverpool fans, lacks the killer instinct. In other words, he’s technically gifted but struggles to score. I’ve yelled at him on the TV, I’ve urged my Arsenal defenders to take him down with a hard tackle that’s not so hard as to injure him or warrant a yellow card but hard enough to make him feel it. I’ve laughed at his many failures.
Until last night, when I found myself weeping as Cody Gakpo wept, curled into himself upon the wet turf of the Estadio Monterrey, surrounded by his orange-clad teammates, the stadium awash in deafening roar. Gakpo’s wife had announced just days before that they had lost an unborn son, Elijah Raphael. He will never see his father play, he will never kick a ball, he will never know the joy of yelling toward the heavens with a crowd of near-strangers united in a quest for an ultimately meaningless end: to win a game, a collective fiction we all choose to believe in anyways.
The goal was magnificent, a throwback to football as it was played in the 1980’s: a long kick from the goalkeeper, a flicked header from the big man Wout Weghorst to the little man Crysencio Summerville, who ran straight to goal shoulder-to-shoulder with his defender until he was pulled down just inside the penalty box, which could have warranted a penalty kick had he taken the fall and feigned injury, but instead, out of some instinctual need to just keep playing, while prone on the ground he managed to cut the ball back towards the goalmouth, setting up Gakpo for a five-yard sprint against his defender with the goalkeeper rushing out, the quintessential 50/50 ball, the only variable at play the question every coach loves to yell at their players, who wants it more?
Cody Gakpo got there first, and he absolutely hammered it. Cue scenes, the whole bench cleared, his teammates rushed in to form a circle around this man who days before had lost a son. They just stood there for a few moments at the center of the din, embracing, yelling, a protective circle of bodies around the wounded and triumphant one, a circle forged in blood and sweat, despair and joy, an eye of the storm, as good a confirmation as you will ever find of Italian manager Arrigo Sachhi’s famous description of football as the most important of the least important things.
I hugged my wife. We wept together. We are expecting a baby, and have lived through several losses. Each time, it’s too much. Each time, we go again. Life is not football. Most days hold little triumph, just the slow and unremarkable work of building towards something we know we will lose. Here’s a poem by David Whyte:
Self Portrait
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
Or many gods.
I want to know if you belong — or feel abandoned;
If you know despair
Or can see it in others.
I want to know
If you are prepared to live in the world
With its harsh need to change you;
If you can look back with firm eyes
Saying “this is where I stand.”
I want to know if you know how to melt
Into that fierce heat of living
Falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing
To live day by day
With the consequence of love
And the bitter unwanted passion
Of your sure defeat.
I have been told
In that fierce embrace
Even the gods
Speak of God.
The Dutch, of course, lost the match in the most heartbreaking fashion, conceding in stoppage time, then succumbing in a penalty shootout. Gakpo didn’t get to take a penalty; he’d been subbed off in extra time after pulling a hamstring. The man who set up his goal, Crycensio Summerville, took a penalty and missed it badly. The Netherlands, that legendary orange army, heads home from yet another tournament without a trophy. The post-game commentators on Fox Sports went on and on about the Netherlands’ failure, the coach’s poor tactics, the loss of “Dutch football DNA.” They have a point, from a sporting perspective, but I won’t remember any of that. From now on, when I see the blazing orange of the Dutch national football team — in a sunset, a popsicle, a neon sign — I’ll think of that group of men melting into the fierce heat of living, knowing, and perhaps even loving, the passion of their sure defeat. I’ll remember how the gods spoke of it.
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