Free Range Photography

Like a passionate romance that starts off too good to be true, yet you keep wading in deeper and deeper until you’re up to your neck, but then you start to slowly realize it wasn’t such a good idea, this person is not what they appeared to be, and pretty soon you’re looking for an exit that doesn’t entail trying to breathe underwater as you hope to escape with one shred of the integrity you thought you had, the 2026 World Cup finishes, and leaves me feeling a little dirty and a lot disappointed.

At first there was the rambunctious joy of the Scottish Tartan Army, and then the beauty and grace of Cabo Verde’s play and its surprising but deserved results against world powers that lifted my spirit. The early success and amazing talent of so many African nations felt like a long-overdue leveling of the playing field while it lasted. Despite FIFA/Infantrumpo, the beautiful game was finding a way to prevail. After the Peace Prize I was going to boycott, but now I was all in. 48 teams? OK, let’s go!

But then came the Whitehouse intervention into discipline against the US, completely destroying the morale of a team just learning to sample success. And then the inconsistent and seemingly slanted interventions by technology and money grabs, including the questionable officiating, often colored by untested and fickle VAR usage. Stomach-churning doubts began to arise as I realized that my hoped-for transcendence of the bullshit that runs the world was not to be. The final blow for me personally came when the team I only sheepishly admit to supporting because of its stuffy, colonial, elitist identity–England–betrayed the quality, mentality and front foot play that got it to the semi-final by giving up after taking a lead and inviting Argentina to do what it had already done several times during the tournament: taking a pit bullish grip on the game late for a come-from-behind win.

I often justify my support of England with the qualification that they always screw themselves in the long run, and so there it was again, peppered into unbearable indigestion by finding out Kane played golf with Trump. My boys crumpled under the weight of their coach’s fear.

The arc of the tournament is a lesson I’ve learned many times before in sport and life, so it’s no shock or trauma to have it reiterated now, and I’m left with that sadly familiar discomfort of realization that ’twas ever thus.

And so I turn back to the birds for solace, for a renewed sense of both smallness and belonging to something bigger than the World Cup, and for the treasured memory of a joy that just a month ago Scotland and Cabo Verde reminded me humans can sometimes be capable of creating.