Orlando Gill spreads his arms near the corner flag and his teammates run into him. He is six foot six and for the last two hours he has made himself look even bigger, but right now, mobbed, he looks like a man trying to hold up a roof.
Two years ago, before any of this, his wife posted something online that almost nobody read. “When Lauti was born, we had nothing. Orlando sold his old club’s clothes***” It sat there unnoticed until his saves against Turkey sent people looking for who he was, and the post came back the way these things do, found again once the man in it mattered.
He kept playing anyway. On Monday night at Boston Stadium in Foxborough, with the sun gone and the floodlights up, the man his wife once described selling his own clothes to get by saved two penalties and ended Germany’s World Cup.
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Manuel Neuer was the story for about four minutes. He stretched low to his right and kept the shootout alive when Germany needed exactly that, a vintage save from a man who knows this is very likely his last World Cup. Jonathan Tah, who had already had a perfectly good header chalked off by VAR in extra time, stepped up last and could have made himself the night’s hero twice over. He put the ball into the stand behind the goal. Jose Canale did not miss. Paraguay had beaten Germany at a World Cup, and the win belonged to Gill before it belonged to anyone else.
It was Gill who had saved Kai Havertz’s opening penalty, low to his left, no fuss in it. Kimmich, Gómez, Musiala and Galarza all converted around it, the shootout running tight and even, until Gill rose again to deny Nick Woltemade, the kind of read goalkeepers spend careers chasing and rarely get more than once. Two saves from four German kicks, and the door was open.
Antonio Sanabria walked up next for Paraguay and could have closed it. He skewed his effort wide. Amiri scored to keep Germany alive, and when Fabian Balbuena stepped up for Paraguay, it was Neuer’s turn to be the story again, guessing right and pushing the ball away. Tah’s miss was still to come.
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Paraguay had not asked for much of the ball all night. Twenty-one per cent of possession, by the count, most of it gathered in the kind of harmless pockets that make a stat sheet feel generous. They sat deep, soaked up wave after wave of sterile German pressure, and waited for the one moment the game was always going to give somebody.
Paraguay goalkeeper Orlando Gill (12) celebrates after blocking a shot by Germany’s Nick Woltemade in a shootout, as Manuel Neuer (1) walks into position. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
It came on the counter, in the 42nd minute. A corner, scrambled and unlovely, Neuer punching clear when he should have caught, Almiron alive to the loose ball, a pass inside to Matias Galarza, and then Julio Enciso, a forward built for long-range strikes, arriving instead at the near post to bury a cross with a header that had nothing delicate about it. Germany had spent the first half passing the ball into corners it could not use. Paraguay needed one moment of carelessness, and Neuer gave it to them.
In the 54th minute, Havertz answered, the way he tends to in tournaments that matter. In big games, Havertz channels his inner Jurgen Klinsmann, the striker with a sniper’s eye. He is not, by his own admission, a natural header of the ball, and yet his last five World Cup games keep finding a way to disagree with him. Florian Wirtz’s cross was exact. Havertz let it arrive rather than chasing it, and turned it past Gill, who could do nothing about it.
That was the last clean thing either side did for over an hour.
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Jamal Musiala was introduced to infuse more ingenuity and break the stubborn Paraguay rearguard. He could not find it. Extra time arrived with the match no closer to a winner, and in the 119th minute Tah rose to head in a corner from Nathaniel Brown, only for the goal to be ruled out, Waldemar Anton judged to have fouled Gill in the build-up. The monitor sat wedged into a technical area so narrow the referee had to ask both benches to physically move so he could reach it. Julian Nagelsmann needed his own staff to keep him on his side of the touchline.
It was that kind of night, somewhere short of classic, two headers the only goals from open play across two hours of football, and a shootout needed to find a winner.
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Gill saved twice from four German kicks. He spreads his arms by the corner flag now, six foot six of a man who once sold his own clothes to keep his family standing, finally allowed to put it down for a night.
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Germany are out, the tournament’s first big casualty, but they had lost their aura long ago. The recent exit was merely a reflection of the rot in their once clockwork system. Paraguay are through to the last sixteen on the back of a goalkeeper nobody outside Asuncion could have named a month ago, and a wife’s old post that finally found the right readers.