Beckham, England Win, 1-0

David Beckham bent the ball over the wall and squeezed England into the World Cup quarterfinals.

Beckham curled a trademark 25-yard free kick just inside the post in the 60th minute, the lone highlight in England’s otherwise ugly 1-0 victory over Ecuador on Sunday. England will play Portugal, which beat the Netherlands, 1-0, in the quarterfinals.

For an hour, the English aimlessly passed the ball in the 90-degree heat of Baden-Wuerttemberg, surrendering chances to Ecuador and missing a few of their own.

The game turned when Edwin Tenorio fouled Frank Lampard outside the penalty area, giving England the free kick.

Then the England captain, whose darting free kicks inspired the 2003 movie title “Bend It Like Beckham,” snatched the ball from the referee, lined up and sent it spinning and twisting toward the goal.

It hooked ever so carefully over a defensive wall of four Ecuadoreans in bright yellow shirts and dipped toward the corner. Goalkeeper Cristian Mora dived to his right and caught a piece of it with his fingertips but couldn’t stop it from grazing the post and squirting into the net.

Shortly after the goal, Beckham vomited on the field -- an apparent symptom of the dehydration that made him feel ill before the match kicked off. He switched from short sleeves to long after the break, and came out of the game in the 87th minute.

“We’ve got to overcome this [heat] because there will be other days like this,” Beckham said. “We make things hard for ourselves. We don’t keep the ball as well as we can do.”