All the updates, highlights from World Cup 2018 Day 9

1. Lionel Messi does not need to win the World Cup to be the greatest player of all time. You may think this goes without saying if you’re an ardent week in, week out follower of the club game, but a lot of people aren’t. This, apparently, needs to be reiterated regularly.

2. If you say Messi needs a World Cup to be the GOAT, you don’t love the game. I mean that seriously. I’m not saying that being a “real fan” is classifiable, and if it was, it wouldn’t require watching every single Barcelona match every season. But I think it’s fair to say that if you don’t occasionally catch a Champions League knockout stage match or a La Liga edition of El Clásico, soccer is not one of your big passions. And anyone who does watch those games semi-regularly can tell it’s a much higher level of the sport than the World Cup. It’s not particularly close. And Messi has dominated at that level consistently, every year, for over a decade.

Every day here at the World Cup, we look back on the goals of the day and rank them to our choosing. We are the goal tastemakers, you see, and we want to pass along our taste in wonderful goals.

Usually we have to kind of cobble together a list, as this World Cup has featured plenty of own goals and penalty kicks. None of that cobbling today. Today there were just beautiful goals. Let’s rank them.

I don’t have a rooting interest in Serbia vs. Switzerland. I really don’t care who wins. But I wanted this goal to go in SO BADLY. Forget best goal of the 2018 World Cup, this might have been one of the best goals of my lifetime if it went in. Xherdan Shaqiri is a legend for this and he didn’t even score.

I feel like I’m going to remember this shot for the rest of my life. The time I almost saw one of the best goals in the history of soccer, and it missed by about six inches. I can’t believe he tried this. I can’t believe it came so close.

The World Cup group stage rolled on with one of the tournament’s biggest favorites and its smallest nation in action on Friday.

In the opener on match day 9, Brazil edged Costa Rica, 2-0, with Coutinho and Neymar both netting late goals to settle a nervy affair. In the middle game, Nigeria brought upstart Iceland, riding high off a surprise draw with Argentina, back to earth. Wrapping up the Friday schedule, Switzerland surged past Serbia in the second half.

Granit Xhaka tied up the game in Switzerland vs. Serbia on Friday when the ball bounced out to him on the left edge of the box and he evaluated his options and then HOLY HELL LOOK AT HOW HARD HE HIT THIS THING.

Some assorted, very brief thoughts about this goal.

Brazil currently sit atop Group H after taking care of business in their second game and beating Costa Rica 2-0, after a disappointing first game in which they tied Switzerland.

Neymar and Brazil are in a good spot, but haven’t locked up advancement past the group stage quite yet.

After the six minutes of extra time were up and Nigeria beat Iceland 2-0, my father, who was in front of me clenching his fists and partially blocking my view of the TV, turned around.

“Yes! At least we can say that we showed up,” he said to me in Igbo. “No matter what happens, we showed up.”

After Spain tied Portugal in an instant classic match to kick off their World Cup, they took care of business against a tough Iran side, and now sit at four points in the group, tied with Portugal.

But with Iran earning a win in their opener against Morocco, this is not yet all wrapped up, and you might be asking: What does Spain need to do to advance out of the group stage?

Portugal have had a thrilling start to the tournament, with Cristiano Ronaldo already scoring four goals, including a hat trick in an instant-classic first game against Spain.

After beating Morocco in a tough game, Portugal now sit tied with Spain atop Group B, though Iran is lurking just behind them at four points.

The soccer plays that people get most excited about seem to be long-range wondergoals. In the age of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, we experienced a cultural shift towards celebrating goals based on how many passes a team took to arrive at them. But it’s my contention that the best play in soccer is a lightning fast direct counter-attack, with something like four-to-five passes being the perfect number for a perfectly aesthetically pleasing goal.

And so I present Ahmed Musa and Nigeria, who scored my favorite goal so far in the 2018 World Cup, with this absolute beauty.

For the 90 minutes that Iceland and Nigeria face off in a World Cup group stage match on Friday, the teams will be at odds. But a gesture from Iceland earlier in the tournament showed there are connections deeper than the standings.

A day after holding Argentina to a historic draw, Iceland’s Jon Dadi Bodvarsson and his teammates shared a message of support for Nigerian international goalkeeper Carl Ikeme, who was diagnosed with acute leukemia in 2017.

Costa Rica will feel hard done by.

It took 91 minutes but Brazil finally scored on Costa Rica, thanks to Phillipe Coutinho, who broke through the line and toed in a shot past Costa Rica keeper Keylor Navas, who up to that point had been the man of the match.

It’s been an eventful first World Cup for the Video Assistant Referee system, and mostly the good kind of eventful. The system is far from perfect, but it’s gotten most of the calls right. And in Brazil vs. Costa Rica on Friday, it got used for a new reason — to overturn a soft penalty.

Initially, referee Bjorn Kuipers gave a penalty for a foul by Giancarlo Gonzalez on Neymar. It was a tense moment — Costa Rica was barely clinging to a 0-0 draw deep into the second half. But he went to VAR, which clearly determined that Gonzalez didn’t commit a foul and Neymar went down easy.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the first few eliminations of this World Cup, it is a bleak one. Russia 2018 does not care for your pretty football. Peru and Morocco have both spent two games weaving delightful patterns between both boxes, but haven’t actually managed to score any goals. As such, they’re going home.

For those that have accepted their inner Galeano — the beggars for good soccer, hands outstretched, pleading for a pretty move — this is serious gutpunch. Apart from anything else, it’s a tragedy of scarcity. This World Cup will be made up of 64 games, but Peru and Morocco will only be involved in a paltry six. And two of those will be meaningless, at least for our beautiful beaten boys.

It wasn’t really until late in the game that Argentina came close to Croatia in total fouls, Croatia finishing with 22 and Argentina with 16. Croatia’s strategy was the same as it was in their first game against Nigeria: to disrupt their opponents, turn the game into a street fight, and then prevail within that chaos. As it did against Nigeria, the strategy worked to perfection against Argentina.

Willy Caballero’s perfect accidental assist for Croatia’s first goal was borne out of an anxiety that defined the entire match. For long stretches, both teams seemed incapable of making good decisions or building play without giving the ball to their opponents. Right after Enzo Perez missed an open goal on one end, Mario Mandzukic missed a sitter of a header at the other.