www.silverguide.site –

In the half-time break at a rain-fogged New York New Jersey Stadium, with England still living out the same painful never-ending 0-0 draw, a lone saxophonist could be heard playing a series of noodling riffs on the deserted concourse outside.

So it’s come to this. Even the New York dinner jazz scene is having a pop now. And sometimes it really does feel as if the world is trying to tell you something. England had been footballing toothache to that point, awkward, rigid, unable to think or move freely, to find combinations to fit the patterns in front of them.

Panama are a good team. The issue was not the scoreline. It was the way England looked, the joylessness, the dead ends, the passing patterns that felt like the footballing equivalent of watching someone very slowly assembling a wardrobe. Oh for a single free spirit, a soloist, some kind of journey up and down the emotional scales.

And England did find this in the second half. What changed was that Jude Bellingham delivered two decisive moments in the space of five minutes.

Bellingham can be dismissed a little by some as a player of moments. Is that bad? Moments win games. Bellingham is 22 and still finding his final form. He promises to do these things, walks and talks like he might do them. But then he also does them, which seems important. With England paddling here, he had the will and the craft to take out the spoons and rattle something off on his knee just when they needed it most.

By the end, as England’s players Wonderwalled it up with their damp and happy travelling fans, a 2-0 win looked pretty good. England have topped the group and will play their last-32 game in Atlanta against the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They haven’t conceded a goal in five halves of football. But this was also a win that told another story for long periods, and a familiar one too.

There was one obvious first-half example of how England get stuck. They came here prepared to face a low block. Thomas Tuchel picked a team for this, with seven types of essentially attacking players in the XI. This was a score-early team, a team to flush out the block, blitzkrieg the Maginot line. None of this actually happened. England played doom-laden marching band music for 50 minutes. But it is important in the context of what came after.

In the event Panama surprised England by playing a high line for much of the time, and pressing high up the field. While this was happening England’s wide players stayed very wide, as they had presumably been told. In this altered setup the space was in behind, not wide, but they didn’t adapt in the moment. Instead England’s two quickest players stood out there waiting, throughly well coached and biddable, seeing the space but not running into it.

Watching this it was tempting to think about all the pre-World Cup innovations: the hot-weather training, the fitness bands, the mattresses brought from home, the heat spray. Fine. Good. Details. Margins. But this was all just so eerily similar to the constipation-ball of Euro 2024.

England have hired a different kind of manager since then. They have different players. But they still express the same thing. “The energy in the stadium skewed our risk management,” was the latest half-time drop from Anthony Barry. Maybe. But it also felt like one of those moments where just saying words like this might be part of the problem.

What changed was Bellingham did something different, no doubt also under orders. The best part was the second goal to kill the game, scored by Harry Kane, but made by Bellingham doing three high-end things very close together. The first was the run in behind the Panama defence. The run was new, the run was somebody playing the game in front of them, not the one in the outmoded briefing.

Bellingham took the ball in his stride on the left. Then he did the second thing, which was the dribble, beating his man with a genuinely purposeful jink. The third thing was an excellent flat left-foot cross, perfectly weighted for Kane to finish close-in.

Bellingham is an unusual footballer in many ways. Despite being an internationalist, despite having never played in the Premier League, he does seem to capture something key about English football in its state of forced modernity. He still feels like a kind of sporting boy-man, wonderful in his basic attributes, physically splendid, and above all a smart, questing footballer. He can be hard to like for some, in part because he doesn’t want to be liked. He wants to be adored. And he wants to win.

What exactly is he elite at in the modern sense, as a technician? Sometimes it feels like nothing. Sometimes, maybe everything. Bellingham still has only eight goals for England in his 51 games, but five of them have come at tournaments, usually at vital moments. This is a footballer who just knows how to bend the day to his will.

It was all the more impressive given how poor England were in that first half. The New York New Jersey Stadium is a terrifying vision from a distance, rising up out of its flat concrete surrounds like the abandoned radiator grille from an intergalactic pickup truck. Inside it’s a huge steep stark bowl, open to the skies, and populated here by fans in cagoules and clingfilm drapes.

England did start quite well, sort of. They began to congeal as they so often do, around the 18-minute mark, that familiar voodoo period. For a while it was Panama who were playing without the handbrake, expressing themselves, shaking off the weight of the shirt and so on.

The game changed around the 62-minute mark, shortly after Jarrel Quansah had gone down after twisting an ankle. Searching for a breath of hope, you half-expected Trent Alexander-Arnold to come abseiling off the lip of the stand like Tom Cruise at the Olympics. Instead it was Bellingham who made the breakthrough with a lovely, clever finish, stretching around his marker to deflect Bukayo Saka’s corner into the net.

By the time Bellingham came off on 71 minutes his game in numbers read: 68 touches, a goal, an assist, most dribbles, most fouls against. He passed long and short. He looked like he wanted to be here.

And this is perhaps the key. England are, as ever, a muddle, a strangely unconvincing mix of hope, talent and will. Better teams will punish that defence if it plays like this again. But they have talent. They have so much more to give. And in the middle of it all they have Bellingham, their own slightly ragged soloist.