Raúl Jiménez scored the goal he had spent three World Cup tournaments waiting for, and he did it with the same black protective band that has followed him through the last five years. His header in Mexico’s 2026 opener against Sudáfrica gave the team a victory and gave Jiménez his first World Cup goal.
The goal came in the 67th minute, when Roberto Alvarado delivered a precise cross and Jiménez beat Ronwen Williams inside the penalty area. He later spoke about the injury that changed how he sees life and football, saying the joy of scoring for his national team in a World Cup ran deep. At 35 years old, he reached 47 goals for the Selección Mexicana.
That moment carried more weight because of what came before it. On 29 November 2020, while playing for Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Premier League, Jiménez collided head-first with David Luiz during a match against Arsenal, lost consciousness on the field and was rushed by emergency to a hospital in Londres. The impact caused a skull fracture and a potentially life-threatening brain injury, one that kept him out for eight months before he returned to the pitch in August 2021.
The band on his head is more than a habit. It has accompanied him for five years, and it remained in place through the 2026 World Cup because he has said he will keep using it for the rest of his professional career. That makes the scene in the opener hard to miss: a player who came close to losing his life in 2020 still running into the box and scoring on the game’s biggest stage.
Jiménez’s strike was also the first World Cup goal of his career despite appearances in 2014, 2018 and 2022, a sequence that makes the 2026 opener feel less like a routine finish than a long-delayed milestone. For Mexico, it was the right kind of start. For Jiménez, it was proof that the injury that altered his life did not end his place in the game.
