In the beginning, the universe was created, and shortly thereafter — in cosmological terms, roughly 13.8 billion years later, though it felt quicker — Argentina beat Algeria 3-0 at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, a venue whose name suggests it was designed to host something considerably more violent, and which the reigning world champions duly obliged by spending ninety minutes making professional footballers from North Africa feel as though they had accidentally wandered into the wrong dimension entirely. The score at half time was 1-0, which is the footballing equivalent of a polite note slipped under the door that reads "we are going to absolutely destroy you in the second half, and we thought you deserved fair warning, out of respect."
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about Argentina's football team: "They have, at various points in history, contained the greatest footballer ever to walk the surface of the Earth, a fact which has given their supporters a permanent, low-level sense of cosmic entitlement that is, remarkably, almost entirely justified." The second half at Arrowhead did nothing to revise this entry. Two further goals arrived with the unhurried confidence of a civilization that has long since stopped worrying about whether the bus will come, because they own the bus company, the road, and three adjacent galaxies. Algeria, to their considerable credit, did not concede a single goal in return — though this is perhaps less remarkable than it sounds when you consider that Argentina were, by all available evidence, playing within themselves in the manner of someone who has been asked to demonstrate parallel parking and is quietly resisting the urge to perform a full handbrake turn.
The Stock Liga algorithm — which processes 40 separate factors about each match through the sort of computational machinery that would have made the ancient Greeks weep with either admiration or existential dread, it's difficult to say — went four for four on this particular fixture, which is, by any reasonable measure, a very good evening's work. Argentina to win at 1.57: landed. Over 0.75 goals at 1.02: landed (actual goals: 3, which is precisely 2.25 more than the minimum required, a surplus the algorithm presumably noted with quiet satisfaction). Over 1.5 goals at 1.34: landed. And, perhaps most pleasingly of all, Both Teams To Score — No — at 1.75: landed, with Algeria contributing a clean sheet's worth of attacking impotence to the proceedings. The algorithm's Survival Index had Argentina's probability of victory calculated at something comfortably in the direction of certainty, and reality, which does not always cooperate with mathematical models (see: nearly everything), on this occasion simply shrugged and went along with it.
What this means for Group J is that Argentina have announced themselves with the sort of opening statement that makes the remaining group fixtures feel somewhat administrative — which is not to say they will be dull, because football, that magnificently irrational enterprise, has a long and distinguished history of making a nonsense of expectations at precisely the moment you feel safest holding them. Algeria, meanwhile, must reconvene, locate their towel (they did not have it tonight, this much is certain), and consider how best to face the remaining group matches without the psychological weight of having been comprehensively outclassed by the planet's most decorated football nation. This is, by a conservative estimate, a significant ask.
It is a strange and wonderful thing, when you think about it from sufficiently far away — from, say, the vicinity of the Crab Nebula, or a particularly quiet corner of the Horsehead — that somewhere on a small blue-green planet orbiting an unremarkable star, 22 humans gathered on a rectangle of grass in front of 76,000 other humans and performed a ritualised kicking ceremony that will be analysed, argued about, and lovingly replayed for decades. Argentina won. Algeria lost. The algorithm was right. And somewhere in Kansas City, for three brief, shining goals, the whole absurd beautiful thing made perfect sense.