A riveting World Cup. But where is the beauty?

The camera moves so quickly that the faces don’t register but the acts do.

- Rohit Brijnath

It’s June 28, the whistle has just gone and it has a finality to it. More than a game is over for the South Africans. One player is bent over, sunk and spent, another sits glumly on the ground. Then the two Canadians come, the first offering a pat of commiseration, the second pulling up the fallen man.

This Cup is emotional, desperate, cruel. But it is still only sport.

On the field, men have run, swivelled, banged shoulders, but mostly held on to spirit. Ugliness has only been found in FIFA’s meekness as the Iranians have been subject to sustained rudeness. Imagine if they were a European team? The Iran side left letters in their dressing room, one of which read in part, “We came to Los Angeles with pride, competed with honour, and leave with dignity.” It is a disgrace that the last-named virtue was never offered to them.

Fans everywhere have hollered, sung, rowed, played bagpipes and football has felt like it should. Joyous. In the English Premier League (or any league), tribalism sets fans rigidly apart, caught in conceited cocoons, but here it feels like a painted carnival of solidarity. We say football is a common language but only here at a Cup do they speak it to one another.

America, for all our suspicion, has been mostly magnificent hosts. In Lawrence, Kansas, base for the Algerian team, a marching band at a local school — as the BBC reported — learnt to play the Algerian national anthem.