All the updates from World Cup 2018 Day 5

Zlatan Ibrahimovic is Sweden’s most famous and certainly among its most successful soccer players ever, yet the 36-year-old striker is not on Sweden’s roster for the World Cup this summer, despite being productive in recent years for Manchester United and scoring plenty of goals for Los Angeles FC in MLS.

You may notice that he isn’t playing today against Mexico.

Let’s talk about Harry Kane, hero of England’s 2-1 win against Tunisia, scorer of a hat trick against Panama, and leader in the World Cup golden boot race.

Kane is absolutely buzzing to be putting in this kind of a performance at the World Cup. He’s always absolutely buzzing. He’s never given a post-match interview following a win where he didn’t tell you that he’s absolutely buzzing.

Through five complete days of World Cup play, there still hasn’t been a scoreless draw. Monday’s slate had a couple of very high-scoring games two, with a total of seven goals hitting the back of the net. But there was one that stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Here are all of Monday’s goals.

Right then. With the greatest respect to Group H, and its stable of dark horses — Colombia, Japan, Poland, Senegal — we’ve now seen them all. All the World Cup favourites. All the teams that have ambitions of lifting the little gold cudgel thing at the end of the tournament, plus England, who are telling anybody who’ll listen: “Hey, we just want to have a nice time.” Nice one, lads. Nobody believes you.

Not every side has had an ideal start. There have been wins, as expected, but they haven’t all been convincing; we’ve also had draws, and even a surprise defeat. More importantly, there haven’t been many truly convincing performances. So should anybody be panicking yet? How much panicking should they be doing, on a scientific scale from one to five? Let’s take a look.

We’re nearly a week into the 2018 World Cup, and the drama is still coming. A trio of notable teams took the field in Russia on Monday for the first time, with England needing a late winner against Tunisia in the final game of the day.

Leading off the day, Sweden edged South Korea, 1-0, through a penalty converted by Andreas Granqvis. In the middle slot, Belgium then eventually overcome a stubborn Panama, 3-0, with a brace from Lukaku. None of the three matchups is a truly marquee event, but England made sure it was a tense and afternoon.

For all the hard work Tunisia put in, they switched off for one moment — forgetting to mark Harry Kane at the back post in a corner kick in stoppage time — and their dream for a shock three points over England was gone.

The game began so brightly for England, and it’s hard for anyone to argue that they don’t deserve the win here. They came out flying against Tunisia, getting in behind several times, and were unlucky not to be up two or three goals in the first fifteen minutes. From there Tunisia settled in, and while not entirely looking convincing, at least looked like they belonged on the field.

Belgium beat Panama, 3-0, on Monday in their World Cup match, and all of the goals for the Belgians were wonderful, but I want to take a moment to talk about the second goal, which was scored by Romelu Lukaku and assisted by Kevin De Bruyne.

Here: Let’s watch it.

Panama are making their first World Cup appearance ever, and before their opening match against Belgium, the players got to experience the dream of hearing their national anthem at the world’s biggest tournament.

It was clear they understood the significance of the moment.

Brazilian goalkeeper Alisson Becker played fine in his team’s 1-1 tie against Switzerland in the opening game of their 2018 World Cup.

He also popped a big inflatable ball that came on the field. People on the internet seemed to enjoy such a thing.

Mexico’s astounding win over Germany in the World Cup on Sunday made history and left people wondering how it happened. Did Germany field its best team? Is Mexico a serious threat this World Cup? Did this grandma’s blessing result in a higher power looking out for El Tri?

This multi-tasking goddess made sure every single player got a blessing during the national anthem, all while holding a bowl of food, because sometimes you’ve got to have your priorities straight. Perhaps most-notably she double-blessed Guillermo Ochoa, who went on to make a critical save on a Toni Kroos shot that would have turned the game.

Fans traveling to South-West Russia to see England play Tunisia on Monday are getting met with the worst welcoming party imaginable — all the bugs.

The city of Volgograd is experiencing a huge number of flies and mosquitos, which is to be expected in summer, but eyes on the ground say it’s far more extreme.

Of all the soccer games I have seen in my life, that was certainly one of them.

Sweden hung on to beat South Korea, 1-0, Monday in their World Cup match, a game that was marked as much by referee’s whistles as any sort of actual soccer. Here, let’s try to find some nice things to say about this game:

Mexico’s win over Germany was as fantastic as it was unexpected. Going up against the defending World Cup champions is never an easy task, especially with Germany still standing as the No. 1 ranked international team in the world and always standing as one of the most talented and dangerous sides around. Sure, Germany weren’t at their best in their warmup friendlies, but neither were Mexico, so even with how talented El Tri are and how high their chances of winning are against almost any other opponent, few gave them a chance to beat Die Mannschaft.

But beat them they did, with Mexico scoring early and holding on to win three huge points and make Germany the third straight defending World Cup champion to lose their opening match of the next tournament. But how did Mexico pull this off? They didn’t just play very very well — they had a big surprise for Germany, a concrete gameplan that proved effective, and particularly inspiring individual performance that paved the way to their success.

It’s tough, being the best. Germany’s loss to Mexico on Sunday may not have been quite as emphatic as Spain’s opening game loss to the Netherlands in 2014 — they only conceded the one goal, as opposed to five, as Spain did — but it still means that it’s happened again. The defending champions, and one of the favourites for the tournament, have face-planted the first hurdle.

So, should they be panicking? Are they going to do as the Spanish did in 2010, and crash out in the group stage? Probably not. Here are three reasons why this shock isn’t quite the same as that shock. Along with one thing that might actually be a harbinger of disaster to come.

South Korea head coach Shin Tae-Yong admitted to using some devious counter-tactics to deal with a representative of Swedish soccer trying to watch their training — he had his players switch jersey numbers because he figured that the Swedes couldn’t tell his players’ faces apart.

This is real.