There is a dish, you see, that the great Portuguese footballing kitchen has been preparing for some years now. It is a very grand dish. It has complicated garnishes and a great deal of expensive seasoning, and the head chef — whichever one they have chosen this week — insists it is nearly ready, nearly ready, nearly ready. And then they serve it, and it comes out at 1-1, in a stadium in Houston, Texas, against the Democratic Republic of Congo. The tablecloth is still very beautiful. But the dish is not quite what was promised.
Congo DR, it must be said at once, were a most extraordinary thing to watch. They defended the way certain small, determined creatures defend themselves in the Norwegian winter — not prettily, not with any great elegance, but with the flat-footed, shoulder-down stubbornness of a thing that has decided, simply, that it will not be moved tonight. Every clearance was a small act of will. Every tackle was a declaration. They were, if one is being honest, a sturdy treacle pudding of a team — unfashionable, deeply unglamorous, and thoroughly difficult to get through. The fullbacks, in particular — those poor invisible craftsmen who will receive not a single mention in the highlights packages — deserve a paragraph of their own. They have earned it. They worked like men who understand that work, unwatched, is still work.
And then — and then something quite unexpected happened — the match arrived at half-time all square, and stayed that way. Portugal, that great gobstopper of a footballing nation, the kind of team whose squad costs more than the GDP of several of the countries competing in this very tournament, could not, in ninety minutes of trying, find a way to separate themselves from opponents who were, by every sensible measure, supposed to lie down and be defeated. One felt a faint scrumbobbling in the natural order of things. One felt the universe had checked its notes and found an error it wasn't sure how to correct.
The Stock Liga algorithm — that watchful, slightly unsettling presence, the kind of benevolent great-uncle who already knows what is in every birthday envelope before it is opened — had a complicated evening of its own. It had picked Portugal to win outright, which, as the referee's final whistle confirmed, was wrong, and the algorithm, to its credit, does not pretend otherwise. It had said both teams would score: wrong again, or rather, right in a way that felt uncomfortably like wrong — they did both score, of course, which means the BTTS "No" prediction missed, and so did the Portugal win. What the algorithm got right, it got very right: under 6.5 goals, naturally, and over 1.5 goals, which, given that exactly two were scored, is the sort of precision that impresses and slightly disturbs in equal measure. Two correct. Two missed. The algorithm has seen things, and sometimes the things it has seen have the decency to happen.
Football is rather like life, you see. The big, expensive, beautifully-assembled teams nearly always win in the end. And when they don't — when they draw 1-1 in a group-stage match against a nation whose qualification alone was a minor miracle — everybody assures you it is a bump in the road, a wobble, nothing more. The manager will speak of fine margins. The captain will speak of character. And perhaps they are right. Perhaps everything will be fine. Portugal still have points. Portugal still have their grand kitchen and their complicated garnishes. There is time yet to serve the dish properly.
But here is the thing that sits oddly, the small stone in the shoe that one notices only on the walk home: the Portugal supporters in NRG Stadium were very loud in the first half. Very loud indeed. And by the final whistle — in that odd, specific silence that falls over large crowds when something they believed in absolutely has failed to arrive — they were making a different kind of noise altogether. Not angry. Not devastated. Something subtler and more uncomfortable than either of those. Congo DR's players, meanwhile, were celebrating in the way people celebrate when they have done something that was not supposed to be possible, which is to say with the particular joy of people who will carry this evening with them for the rest of their lives. Portugal's players were not celebrating anything. They were standing on a pitch in Houston, Texas, holding a result that tasted, one imagines, of nothing whatsoever.