Section 1 of three

The nights that changed an assumption

Cameroon 1990, Senegal 2002, Korea/Japan, Morocco 2022.

• A team nobody rated beat the holders in the opening gameCameroon beat Argentina in the 1990 opening match and reached the quarter-final, which changed how African qualification was argued about afterwards.
• A thirty-eight-year-old came off the bench and defined a tournamentRoger Milla's 1990 goals and the corner-flag celebration are the images that carried the tournament, and he was recalled from semi-retirement to score them.
• The opening game beat the holders again, twelve years laterSenegal beat France in the 2002 opening match with a squad drawn largely from the French league system.
• The first Asian World Cup was co-hosted, which had never been doneKorea/Japan 2002 was the first tournament in Asia and the first shared between two countries, which created problems nobody had solved before.