There is something almost cosmically repetitive about this particular fixture, as though the football gods, bored of novelty, keep reaching into the same drawer. England versus Croatia. Again. The ghost of Ivan Perišić rising at Wembley in 2018. The pale, bewildered face of a nation that had let itself believe, briefly, luminously, in something. And now here they are again, under the burning Texas sky, at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, which is less a football ground than a monument to the theology of American largeness.
Thomas Tuchel's England arrive as clear favourites, and as one of the tournament's leading contenders. This is either enormously reassuring or, if you know anything about the psychic architecture of English football, a cause for immediate, low-level dread. The qualifying numbers are, frankly, almost suspicious in their cleanliness: eight wins, 22 goals, none conceded across a full UEFA group campaign. A nation that has historically treated qualification as an obstacle course of unnecessary suffering apparently just... won everything. Tuchel has achieved the rare and slightly unsettling feat of making England look organised.
Luka Modrić, meanwhile, heads into what is widely understood to be his final World Cup at 40 years old, his influence on Croatia's tempo still irreplaceable, even as the physical demands of high-press football in Texan heat present a challenge that no amount of midfield genius can entirely resolve. He remains, even now, a footballer of such architectural elegance that watching him play feels like being handed a small, perfect object and told to appreciate it quickly before it disappears.
England's width through Bukayo Saka and the movement of Harry Kane should provide consistent problems for a Croatian defensive line that has conceded in recent friendlies. Kane, burdened as ever by the accumulated weight of national expectation, will press his forehead against that weight and run into it anyway, because that is what he does. It is not elegant. It is, in its way, magnificent.
The group — England, Croatia, Ghana, Panama — is competitive but ultimately navigable, and Tuchel's side should win it. Whether they can go further is the more interesting, more frightening question. The squad depth is real. The tactical coherence is genuine. What remains unresolved, as ever, is the psychological interior of a team that has spent sixty years being haunted by a single afternoon in July 1966. Dallas offers no exorcism. Only a beginning