Jude Bellingham bends another day to his will after Panama stifle England

five minutes.’ Photograph: Ian MacNicol/Getty Images Analysis Jude Bellingham bends another day to his will after Panama stifle England Barney Ronay at New York New Jersey Stadium A joyless England display, football’s equivalent of assembling a wardrobe, was rescued by the No 10 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. England’s creaky defence is a World Cup worry and they need Rice back firing | Jacob Steinberg Read more 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. Jude Bellingham player guide 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.

📝 This article summarizes content originally published by The Guardian. All credit to the original source.