The AT&T Stadium in Arlington — that vast, climate-controlled American cathedral to excess, with its retractable roof and its colossal screen suspended above the pitch like something a Texan oil man had commissioned on a whim and a three-martini lunch — provided, on this particular Tuesday evening, the setting for a match that seemed determined from its first minutes to render all prior calculation obsolete. England beat Croatia four goals to two. The margin is comfortable. The journey was not.
The Stock Liga assessment, delivered with the cool precision one expects from people who do this sort of work professionally, had made three calls before kickoff. Two of them stand up to examination. England to win, priced at one-seventy-five — that landed cleanly, as it deserved to. The over one-point-five goals line, offered at the sort of odds that suggest even the market considered it a formality, landed with considerable room to spare. Six goals will do that. The two misses, however, are worth a moment of honest accounting: the under-five-goals call — the one offered at one-point-oh-two, the kind of price that implies a near-certainty and therefore always conceals the particular embarrassment when it fails — missed by a single goal, which is precisely the way these things tend to miss, with maximum irony and minimum sympathy. The both-teams-to-score-no proposition, priced generously at one-eighty-one, was undone by the Croatians, who had the considerable inconvenience of scoring twice themselves. Four from four would have been a satisfying evening at the tables. Two from four, with the correct winner and the correct direction of goals, is a decent evening with one or two moments best not dwelt upon.
That the match stood level at two goals apiece at the interval tells one something about the Croatian character — a national temperament that has, over the decades, refined itself into something lean and combative, like a good hunting knife carried by a man who has crossed several borders under difficult circumstances. The Croatians, as one might have anticipated, brought that characteristic Central European stubbornness to the first half, that willingness to absorb pressure and reply precisely and without sentiment. The second half, however, was England's, and England in the second half — composed, methodical, capable of the sort of sustained pressure that the English game at its best applies the way a good craftsman applies a plane to resistant wood — is a different proposition altogether. The fourth goal, whenever it arrived, will have carried with it the particular finality of a heavy door being closed from the inside.
The fourth official — a compact man with the bearing of someone who had refereed in leagues where the crowd's opinion of his decisions could become a physical matter — was observed between halves making a note in what appeared to be a Montblanc Meisterstück, the classic one-forty-nine, in black resin and gold. Whether this detail signified anything beyond a man of careful professional habits is not entirely clear. It is noted.
England's manager, who had spent the interval with the expression of a man reviewing a quarterly report that contains one very encouraging column and one that requires a conversation with the relevant department, will have emerged into the second period with certain adjustments made. The Croatian head coach, for his part, had the slightly stilled quality of a professional who understands the arithmetic and has decided to continue playing anyway, which is either admirable or melancholy depending on one's disposition. Both of them, one suspects, were drawing on something before the teams re-emerged — a Senior Service, perhaps, or in the Croatian's case something darker and more Continental, a Drina perhaps, or a cheap local brand that no tobacconist outside the Dalmatian coast would trouble to stock.
England top their group, or near enough, and the Stock Liga Survival Index will have shifted accordingly — that quiet, 40-factor recalibration that happens without fanfare after each match, the way Lloyd's adjusts a marine premium after a vessel completes a difficult crossing. The algorithm is, on balance, satisfied. Croatia remain in the tournament and will be dangerous again. They usually are. Six goals, two teams, one winner. The AT&T Stadium roof closed against the Texas night, and the price of England, for this particular evening, was confirmed.