United States 4-1 Paraguay: FIFA World Cup Match Report

At half-time our both-teams-to-score call was three goals down and looking dead. It finished United States 4-1 Paraguay, with the second half producing one goal for each side, and a bet that had no business surviving the interval came home.

The 3-0 half-time score is the more informative number here. A host nation's opening match carries a particular kind of pressure, and the standard failure mode is a tense, cautious ninety minutes; this was the opposite. The United States settled the contest before the break and their four goals in this match accounted for half of everything they scored across the entire group stage — an 8:4 record built substantially on one afternoon.

Paraguay's reply is the other half of the story. It arrived after the match was gone, and it was one of only two goals they scored at the tournament. What they did from that point onward was rather more impressive than the scoreline suggests: having conceded four here, they conceded none at all in their remaining hundred and eighty minutes of group football.

The United States led Group D from the opening day and never gave up the position, finishing on six points despite a 3-2 defeat to Turkey in the final round. They went into the Round of 32 against Bosnia-Herzegovina.

For Paraguay a four-goal opening defeat proved survivable. They beat Turkey 1-0 and drew 0-0 with Australia, finishing on four points with a 2:4 record and a place in the Round of 32 against France. Their qualification was built entirely on not conceding again, because the goal difference from this match left no room for a second bad night. Australia also finished on four and went through as a best third-placed side; Turkey were the group's only casualty, eliminated on three points with the same minus-two goal difference Paraguay carried into the knockout rounds.

That is the shape of Group D in one line. The United States banked their points on the opening weekend and were never caught; the places behind them were settled by a 1-0 and a 0-0, low-scoring games between teams who had worked out that the margin for a second heavy defeat did not exist.

Our pre-match call was Both Teams to Score at 1.85. It won, and we should be clear that the reasoning behind it did not. We argued that host-nation nerves and Paraguay's disruptive, physical approach pointed to an edgy, tightly contested game in which neither defence stayed clean. The game was not edgy and it was not tight; it was 3-0 at half-time. Paraguay's goal came because the contest had already been decided, not because they had dragged the hosts into the scrappy affair we described. Right ticket, wrong match. Verdict: won