Eloy Room Saved A Place For Himself And Curacao In World Cup History

We can cancel the last 66 games of the World Cup right now and fast forward to the final, because we’ve seen all we have a right to see. Put Curacao and Cape Verde in the final, make it The Revenge Of The Postage Stamp Nations and call it a win. The final may take three days before we get a goal, but that’s still a far more economical system than the one we have.

Not that the other games haven’t had their moments, mind you. It’s actually been quite the dandy pigpile so far, with the big names, the about to be big names (hello Deniz Undav and Brian Brobbey) and the Dutch royal family flying all over hell trying to catch games for each one of their constituencies. You have, we dare say it, been entertained.

But the Blue Sharks and Blue Wave (serendipity is where you find it) have easily been the most charming of the 48 sides simply by being their wonderfully goofy selves. Cape Verde shut out the mighty Spanish (while in fairness being shut out themselves) and 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha, who turned away seven shots, increased the size of his Instagram audience 400 times (it sits at nearly 15 million as we type), only to be outdone by Curacao’s 37-year-old Eloy Room, who made either a record or near-record 15 saves in a 0-0 draw with Ecuador. The ambiguity comes because FIFA, which has a nasty habit of inflating numbers across its many interests, lists the U.S.’s Tim Howard with 16 saves against Belgium in 2014 while ESPN and other noodges insist that one of the 16 shots was actually off target. If you want to look up which shot it was, you go right ahead. We’re still enjoying the delicious up-yours-Fox audacity of Japan-Tunisia being played at midnight Eastern and have no time for your silly pedantry.