The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The worst kind of dread is the kind that has already done its work. It doesn't arrive tonight — it arrived some time ago, quietly, while you were still hoping you were wrong. By the time you name it, it has already moved in and rearranged the furniture.
This is what a tournament does to you when it wants to be cruel. Not the shock. Not the sudden drop. The slow, complete delivery of understanding. It hands you the map and the weather forecast and the exact elevation profile, and it says: now walk.
I know what this fixture feels like from here. It feels like a room you've agreed to enter. The door was always going to be this one. The first game was always going to become weight rather than relief — not because anything went wrong, but because that is what a first game becomes when the second game is this second game.
Scotland will walk toward this knowing. That is the condition. They will feel the first result sitting behind them, hear it recalibrate with every step, and still they will go.
I'm not afraid for them in the way dread expects. I'm something slower than afraid. I'm in the stillness that comes after understanding has finished arriving.
The match is coming. The knowing is already here.