Three weeks ago, I was in a bar in Washington, D.C., watching the Champions League final, when the Egyptian striker Mohamed Salah went down with a shoulder injury. Everyone watching the game put their drinks down and stared at the television with the sort of concern usually reserved for loved ones. Salah—who scored an astonishing forty-three goals in forty-seven games this past season—had spent the past year making himself the darling of soccer fans around the world. To see him writhing in pain during the biggest European club game of the year elicited a sympathy I have honestly never felt for a member of a rival team: Salah plays for Liverpool, and I root for Arsenal. But Salah’s smile, his self-deprecating disposition, and his ability to score out of nowhere have caused me to root for any team he plays for—including the Egyptian national team, which faced Uruguay in the World Cup on Friday.

That shoulder injury made it seem unlikely that Salah would play in the tournament at all, but his recovery exceeded expectations; on Thursday, the Egyptian coach, Héctor Cúper, said, of the first match against Uruguay, “I can almost assure you a hundred per cent that he will play.” But Salah started on the bench, and, as the match went on, it became clear that he would not play after all. For a while, it looked as though this might be a shrewd maneuver: the match remained scoreless through eighty-eight minutes, and, if Egypt could claim a draw against Uruguay while saving its best player—who is perhaps not at full strength—for more crucial games later on, then that might give the country its best shot at advancing. The team was playing well without its star, though it were lucky that Luis Suárez—the striker with a villainous reputation and a notorious taste for his opponents—missed his numerous chances to score.

Then, in the eighty-ninth minute, the substitute Carlos Sánchez swung a free kick from the right side of the field into the box while a sea of red (Egypt) and white (Uruguay) jerseys jostled one another for position. As the ball looped in, the Uruguayan defender Jose Gimenez leapt over three Egyptian defenders, and, with a thunderous swing of his head, powered the ball past the frozen goalkeeper and into the net. As his teammates, from both the bench and the field, sprinted toward one another in jubilation, the camera, inevitably, panned to Salah, who leaned his head back in evident despair. He will likely play in Egypt’s next two matches, against Saudi Arabia and Russia, and his country still has a chance to move on.

Further Reading More coverage of the 2018 World Cup from The New Yorker.

I thought of the time, in 2010, when Americans experienced the other side of a similar moment: Landon Donovan’s last-minute goal to defeat Algeria in that year’s World Cup. I watched that game in my home town of New Orleans, in a house full of people alongside whom I had once dreamed of playing in the very tournament that we were watching. None of us, shockingly, became professional athletes, much less went on to compete on the sport’s most prestigious stage, but together we watched with the same passion we had as children—when the U.S. scored, we piled on top of one another. Today, I watched the Egypt game alone, on spotty Wi-Fi, during a writer’s retreat outside of Pittsburgh. Because of the quality of the Internet, I knew Uruguay had scored before I saw it: the group chat that I have with friends I played soccer with in college exploded in collective agony, and my Twitter timeline lit up with collective sympathy for Egypt, and for Salah. After I saw the goal for myself, I closed my laptop, and accepted that little writing, other than this piece, would get done today. My phone kept buzzing: the group chat was now debating whether Salah should have been put into the game. On my screen, the Egyptian players sat on the field, knowing that they have made progress to the next round much more difficult than it might have been.