The MetLife Stadium, that vast commercial cathedral rising from the New Jersey marshlands with the Manhattan skyline visible on a clear evening behind the western stands, had been built for American football — a game that rewards collision and spectacle in roughly equal measure — and there was, in the end, something faintly appropriate about that, because France arrived on this particular Tuesday with the efficient brutality of an organisation that has long since stopped confusing beauty with effectiveness. The final score was three goals to one. At half time it had been nothing to nothing. The second half, when it came, had the quality of a door being opened — and then, with rather little ceremony, being shut again.
The Stock Liga assessment, delivered with the quiet confidence of people who have spent considerable time with numbers that the layman would find either boring or impenetrable, had identified France as the evening's correct selection at odds of 1.53 — a price that implied something close to certainty, and proved, in the event, to be exactly that. The algorithm had further suggested that the match would exceed one and a half goals, which it did, and that the total would remain comfortably beneath six and a half, which it also did. These were the clean calls. The model's suggestion that the match would produce fewer than two goals was rather more optimistic than the facts warranted, and the prediction that Senegal would fail to find the net — the BTTS No, at 1.91 — was undone by a Senegalese side that, whatever else one might say about them, refused to conclude the evening without leaving some evidence of their presence. Credit where it is due.
One had watched the Senegalese approach the match with the particular kind of controlled optimism that tends to characterise sides who know, somewhere in the professional part of their thinking, that the margin for error is very small. The better Senegalese players moved with the long-limbed, high-shouldered athleticism of West African footballers who have spent formative years in the French academy system — learning the geometry of the game in the langue of the opposition, which is either an advantage or a kind of inheritance one can never quite spend without complication. They found their goal. It was not enough, and they will have known before the final whistle that it was not going to be enough.
France, as one might expect of the French temperament in its more disciplined register, did not hurry. They are, as a football nation, the inheritors of a curious duality — the Latin instinct dressed in Cartesian logic — and in the second half at MetLife they applied that duality with the smooth, almost undemonstrative precision of a watchmaker examining a movement through a loupe, adjusting here, tightening there, three goals emerging from the process with the inevitability of a well-made argument arriving at its conclusion. The French coaching staff had assembled on the touchline in the manner of men who had made their decisions at the hotel that morning and saw no reason to revisit them. One of them, a compact man in a dark training top, spent the final twenty minutes with a Senior Service burning between two fingers and the expression of someone reading a balance sheet that has confirmed what he already knew.
A minor observation, perhaps without consequence: the fourth official — a trim, precise figure whose note-taking instrument appeared to be a very specific shade of green ballpoint pen, the sort one associates with South American customs houses rather than FIFA appointments — recorded each substitution with an almost aggressive neatness. Whether this signified anything beyond personal habit was impossible to say. Some men are simply tidy. The notepad was new. So, on this evidence, is France's claim on whatever comes next in this tournament.
The Stock Liga model, viewed across the evening's full ledger, performed rather as a good intelligence service performs — correct on the large questions, occasionally surprised by operational detail. The French win was never seriously in doubt once the second half had begun its work, and the algorithm's 40-factor read on the situation proved equal to the occasion in every meaningful respect. Senegal, for their part, depart the MetLife having demonstrated that they are not a side to be dismissed without effort. They simply had the misfortune of encountering, on this particular evening, a France team that had brought enough.