SI:AM | Get Ready for the World Cup’s Best Week

The drama will be ratcheted up a notch with wall-to-wall knockout stage action.

Canada is the first team to punch its ticket to the next round of the World Cup. Fifteen more will advance over the next five days. | Jessie Alcheh-Imagn Images

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I have to respect all the fans who showed up for this morning’s playoff between Viktor Hovland and Scottie Scheffler at the Travelers Championship. The whole thing was over in about 15 minutes after Scheffler missed a short putt. 

In today’s SI:AM:
🇨🇦 Canada moves on
🏈 Breer’s NFL Takeaways
⚾ MLB mock draft

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The World Cup is heating up

If you enjoyed Canada’s late win over South Africa yesterday afternoon, there’s plenty more where that came from. 

This week is shaping up to be perhaps the best week of the entire World Cup. Sure, the climactic matches will be great, and the worldwide representation of the group stage was a joy, but this week will feature the perfect combination of high stakes and nonstop action. 

There will be 15 do-or-die matches between now and Friday (three each day). Unlike in the group stage, a traditional power can’t shake off a poor result against an underdog. Perhaps best of all for U.S. fans, there will be no more draws. If the game is tied after 90 minutes, they’ll play 30 minutes of added time. If it’s still level after that, you’ll have the white-knuckle drama of a penalty shootout. 

I’ll admit I was wrong about the expanded World Cup format. I thought it would dilute the group stage, but I underestimated the number of quality teams that were in the field. Who would have predicted that DR Congo and Cabo Verde would advance to the knockout stage? I wouldn’t expect either of them to win their next game (against England and Argentina, respectively), but their early success was a reminder that soccer can be beautifully unpredictable. And this week you’ve got 15 chances to see something unexpected happen. 

A historic WNBA game

Anyone who’s a fan of international soccer and the WNBA faced a difficult choice yesterday at 3 p.m. ET: Should they watch the Canada-South Africa knockout stage match or the Fire-Mystics game? Well, Portland and Washington made sure people could catch the thrilling conclusion of both contests. 

The Fire-Mystics game tied a WNBA record by taking four overtime periods to determine a winner. It lasted nearly four hours before Washington came away with a 124–123 victory. 

Portland’s Carla Leite and Washington’s Sonia Citron stole the show, both scoring 32 points. Leite sank a wild, off-balance three off the backboard as the buzzer sounded at the end of regulation to send the game to OT and drilled another deep three in the closing seconds of the first overtime to keep her team in it. Citron had a clutch layup through traffic to tie the game with 15 seconds left in the second overtime, and Portland’s Bridget Carleton hit a smooth turnaround jumper to force the fourth OT. Citron’s layup with 21.4 seconds left in the fourth overtime proved to be the game-winner. 

The only other game in WNBA history to go to four overtimes was on July 3, 2001, when the Mystics beat the Storm, 72–69. Comparing the scores of those two games is a great way to illustrate the progress the WNBA has made since its early days. That 2001 game was tied at 50 at the end of regulation, a score teams these days routinely surpass by halftime. There has not been a game in which neither team scored more than 50 points since 2008. 

That 2001 game was a slog. Each team scored just 10 points in the first three OT periods combined. Yesterday’s game, on the other hand, was a legitimate thriller played in front of a sellout crowd. The league has come a long way in the past 25 years.  

Red Sox sweep Yankees in dramatic fashion

The Red Sox’ walk-off win over the Yankees last night will either be the high point of a lost season or the start of a stunning turnaround. 

Boston came from behind to win in walk-off fashion in the 10th inning on Sunday Night Baseball and complete a four-game sweep of the archrival Yankees for the first time since 2018. 

New York, after being held without a hit for more than seven innings by Sonny Gray, had tied the game in the top of the ninth with the help of a throwing error by Red Sox right fielder Wilyer Abreu. The Yankees scored two runs in the top of the 10th to take the lead, but Boston jumped all over reliever Fernando Cruz in the bottom of the inning and won the game on Jarren Duran’s walk-off single. 

The Red Sox’ hopes of turning their season around are still slim. They’re in last place in the AL East at 36–46, 12 ½ games behind the first-place Rays and 4 ½ games out of the final wild-card spot. They haven’t played much better since they fired manager Alex Cora and five assistant coaches in late April. Unlike the Phillies, who fired their manager around the same time and have since gone on a tear, Boston is 26–29 under new manager Chad Tracy. 

Red Sox players and fans celebrated like crazy after Duran’s clutch hit—as they should. A comeback win to complete a four-game sweep against your biggest rival is a huge deal, regardless of how the rest of the season is going. It’s possible that the sweep sparks something for this struggling team. Fangraphs still gives them a 17.8% chance of making the playoffs. But if Boston doesn’t reach the postseason, Red Sox fans will still remember 2026 as the year Jarren Duran walked off the Yankees on national TV to wrap up a sweep. 

The best of Sports Illustrated

Jesse Marsch has led Canada into uncharted territory. | Jessie Alcheh-Imagn Images

• Albert Breer: Albert Breer’s Takeaways: Where Every NFL Team Stands at Summer Break
• Ben Steiner: Jesse Marsch Had a Vision and Now Canada Is Reaching New Heights at the World Cup
• Bryan Fischer: 2026 World Cup Golden Boot Race Is Shaping Up to Be the Best in History
• Mike Kadlick: NFL Uniform Rankings: Every Team’s 2026 Look, From Worst to Best
• Ryan Phillips: 2026 MLB Mock Draft 2.0: Roch Cholowsky, Grady Emerson, Vahn Lackey Battle to Go No. 1

The top five…

… things I saw yesterday: 
5. The Cubs’ game-saving double play. 
4. Some quick hands by the Valkyries’ Kayla Thornton to set up a fast break opportunity. 
3. Junior Caminero’s towering 463-foot blast. (Caminero has homered in each of his last four games and has seven homers in his last six games.)
2. Brandon Nimmo’s catch while colliding with the wall to record the final out of the Rangers’ win over the Blue Jays. (Texas took all four games in Toronto this weekend.)
1. Stephen Eustáquio’s powerful strike for Canada’s winning goal against South Africa.