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.

And when we say outdone, Room, who plays for Miami FC in the second-tier USL Championship and previously played for MLS Cup winner Columbus, talked his talk afterward as any instant hero in America would.

“A little bit annoyed that I don’t have the record from Tim Howard, ” he said in the postgame smacktalk, “but I think he was sweating in front of the TV because I was close.

“But no, it’s unbelievable. And I cannot do it alone. I did it with the team and my defenders and the midfielders, strikers. We did it as a team.”

The second part seems a bit of a stretch, though, since Room faced 28 shots in total, which would suggest that the Curacao back line didn’t do all that much to help the cause. Congratulations to Room, though, for knowing how to keep them on his side.

But he rallied from that brief moment of humility to suggest with a smile “I think I need a statue in Curacao now.” Given that King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima, who are definitely characters in a game on your phone, were in the locker room “dancing to our music,” according to Room, that seems a doable ask. I mean, if they’ve got time to go to Houston, watch the Dutch score five times against Sweden, and then schlep up to Kansas City for Curacao (a constituent nation of the Netherlands), it’s not like they have more important duties preventing them from approving a statue, as long as they’re also willing to chunk in for Brobbey and Cody Gakpo. The deeper the run, the more bronze you need, apparently.

Between Cape Verde and Curacao, whose combined population is less than Nashville’s, we have our World Cup moments. Two nations invisible on most maps each have a point in the loftiest competition on the planet, and Curacao’s 0-0 draw obliterates whatever grumpiness they might have exhibited after Germany whomped them 7-1 in the opener. On that day, they were thrilled to have the goal they got from Livano Comenencia. On this day, well, let the grogue and AMFs flow from every home, school and church. We have seen the future we want as opposed to the mudslide we have, and it is found in the geriatric goalies and the tiny island nations with the combined area that still makes them smaller than French Polynesia, who never did anyone else any harm, finally finishing off that meek/inheriting thing and kicking the world in the ass. We need to contrive a way for them to play for the title even if it means fixing the odd quarterfinal. Hey, you have your World Cup and we have ours.