For the first time since 1982, no African team has advanced to the knockout round of the World Cup. Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Nigeria, and Senegal have all been eliminated. The three North African teams were out before playing their final matches; Nigeria and Senegal went into their last group-stage games this week carrying both momentum and hope for a continent that has yet to see one of its teams advance beyond the quarter-finals in the eighty-eight year history of the tournament.
Me: There are real cultural & sociopolitical differences between Black Americans & their African counterparts that we should take into account rather than simply conflating these populations.
Me during the World Cup: I AM A CHILD OF THE CONTINENT & I AM THE SOIL OF THE DIASPORA
— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) June 24, 2018
Nigeria’s final match, on Tuesday, was against Argentina, which had, to that point, looked like a shadow of itself. Following two dreadful performances, Lionel Messi, perhaps the greatest player in the world, scored a stunning goal early on, but the Nigerians levelled the game a few minutes after halftime, on a Victor Moses penalty. For most of the rest of the game it appeared as though it would end in a draw, and Nigeria would advance. Then, in the eighty-sixth minute, Marcos Rojo scored on a first-time volley from a Gabriel Mercado cross to send Argentina to the next round and Nigeria out of the tournament.
African hopes, then, settled on the shoulders of the Senegalese. They had already beaten Poland and tied Japan, and entering their last group-stage game, against Colombia, there were a number of possible paths forward: a win or a tie would see them through, and even a loss would be enough if Japan lost their last game, against Poland, by enough goals.
The four teams in each group play their final games simultaneously, so that the result in one won’t spoil the drama of the other. For obsessives, like me, this means watching one game on television, another on my computer, and reading running commentary from friends’ text messages and the Twitter timeline on my phone. When I caught myself in the mirror, I briefly took note of how ridiculous I looked: pacing around my living room, talking frantically to the television and then the laptop and then to the soccer gods above, asking for some sort of divine intervention on behalf of the Senegalese team.
Throughout most of the Senegal-Colombia match, it looked as if the Lions of Teranga would sail undisturbed into the next round. Colombia mounted few meaningful attacks and their best player, James Rodríguez, limped off the field after half an hour. When Poland scored against Japan, in the match that was streaming, without sound, on my laptop, I felt certain that both Senegal and Colombia would go through. But in the seventy-fourth minute, Colombia’s Juan Fernando Quintero sent in a corner kick that was met by his six-feet-five teammate Yerry Mina, who leapt over three Senegalese defenders and headed the ball between the goalkeeper, Khadim N’Diaye, and the Senegalese defender, Idrissa Gueye, who was leaning, far too casually, on the goal post.
Senegal could not come up with an equalizer, and lost 1–0. Japan lost 1–0, too. And the two teams finished group play with the same number of wins and losses, as well as the same goal differential. As a result, Senegal became the first team in the history of the tournament to be eliminated by fifa’s fair-play rule: they had accumulated six yellow cards, compared to Japan’s four, and so they were out. It is difficult to think of a more subjective metric by which to determine which team should move on to the next round. That subjectivity becomes even more worrying if you’ve read much about racial bias in refereeing.
Earlier this week, I had joked, on Twitter, about the way that I and many other black Americans experience the World Cup.