The 2026 FIFA World Cup has gotten off to a flying start on the pitch.
With the expanded tournament, it's a bigger extravaganza than ever before, and that means the Cup is more action-packed than ever. With so much happening every day, ESPN India attempts to pick out the one magical moment that defined the day's action.
For Day 10, we pick Eloy Room's magnificent goalkeeping performance for Curaçao against Ecuador.
*****
Enner Valencia was sure this would be it.
The clock read 1:59 when Valencia got his foot on the ball in the opposition box, in Ecuador's must-win match against Curaçao. The scorer of 245 goals for club and country across a decade and a half, Valencia had been played through by a superb long ball from Moisés Caicedo, and as he raced in behind the three-man Curaçao backline, he was sure he'd done everything right.
Controlling the ball perfectly, moving across the backtracking Armando Obispo to stop him from doing anything about what was to follow, the touch getting the ball out of his feet and setting him up perfectly to take a shot, looking the keeper in the eye -- he let fly, low and hard, aiming at hitting the bottom corner. 1-0, surely. Against a keeper that had just conceded seven goals to Germany a few days back, this would open the floodgates...
Eloy Room, though, had other ideas. Staying on his feet as long as possible, waiting to see which way Valencia would shape to shoot, Room dived just as Valencia hit it, going low and strong to parry the effort out. As Valencia jogged away, his celebration dead before it took off, his face wore a look of disbelief. 'Eh? How? What?'
Little did he know then that this would just be the start.
At the end of the ninety (plus nine minutes added across halves), Ecuador created 3.12 xG, hit 27 shots on goal, 15 of those on target, and saw each of those 15 saved by a 37-year-old keeper playing in a mid-table US second division club. Room -- a product of the Vitesse academy in the Netherlands, a journeyman who'd spent much of his career at Vitesse and MLS club Columbus Crew -- had just set a record for the most saves by any goalkeeper in 90 minutes of a World Cup match since records began in 1966.
Curaçao had their first ever World Cup point, in just their second ever World Cup game, and the pain of that 7-1 loss to Germany was consigned to the bin. They had held one of the tournament dark horses to a goalless draw. "It is unreal, the journey where we came from and we are now here and we showed we have real heart, it's an unbelievable feeling," he said after the match.
Winner of 75 caps with the tiny island nation (population ~1,50,000), Room has previous with this kind of experience, albeit at a much smaller scale. In 2019, Room made 12 saves as Curaçao registered their first ever Gold Cup win vs Honduras. Having been through it all after making the call to represent his father's nation, he had then become a big part of their historic qualification campaign, when they became the smallest nation to make it to a World Cup proper. Now, the oldest player in the squad was making a mark at the big one itself.
It had been a remarkable performance... amongst those 15 saves were all sorts: flying leaps, reflexive paws away, regulation catches, ones low down and high up, but none of them were as technically perfect, as intimidating-to-the-opposition as the first one, the one he made when Ecuador had been sure this was going to be a walk in the park for them.
That singular moment laid down a marker and signalled the beginning of what was to become history. As an exhausted Room joked after the match, "I think I need a statue in Curaçao now."