Three matches into Euro 2024, you could probably make a good 45-minute compilation of Jude Bellingham’s highlights. Trouble is, they would all be from the same 45 minutes.
In a column on these pages on the eve of the tournament, one of my colleagues warned not to expect the world of a young man who turned 21 on Saturday and who arrived in Germany surely feeling the mental and physical toll of an historic first season at Real Madrid, which only ended in the Champions League final at the start of this month.
Others, including Gareth Southgate, beat the same drum and, having fallen into this trap before, and with so much other extreme talent in the side to pin hopes on, there was even an acknowledgement among the wider fanbase that it need not be ‘Jude or bust’.
And then Serbia happened, Bellingham producing perhaps the most exciting half of tournament football from an England player since Wayne Rooney’s breakout two decades before, and we all were guilty of allowing ourselves to wonder if, like so much else, the fickle laws of form and fatigue might not apply to our phenomenon.
Two outings since have reminded us all otherwise: a peripheral display against Denmark, when frustration was visible and he tried to do too much alone; then a poor one against Slovenia, when of England’s 682 passes, just one was between Bellingham and Harry Kane.
Ahead of Sunday’s last-16 meeting against Slovakia, there have been calls for Bellingham to be dropped (spoiler: that will not be happening here). Others want him ‘rested’, but in knockout football there really is no such thing.
If you are left out of a game that might be the summer’s last, even if only for not being fit or fresh enough, that, my friends, is still being dropped.
In the panic at England’s struggle, there have been whisperings of discontent: too much ‘main character’ energy, too much ego; dissections of body language, accusations of brattishness; the wondering whether one man might think he is above it all, even in a side levels below par.
They have come, though, in tones of hushed reluctance, not anger or glee. Still now, there is not a man, woman or child in the country who does not want the legend to be made true.
Two quiet nights have not changed the fact that Bellingham is the darling of this team, the player whose name will be cheered loudest in Gelsenkirchen this weekend, and one of its two or three best players when all are on peak form, which, right now, none are.
He admitted on Thursday to having been “absolutely dead” by the end of Tuesday’s 0-0 draw with Slovenia, but one suspects it is in his character to find a little more now that the knockout stages are here.
Two quiet nights have not changed the fact that Bellingham is the darling of this team
And, frankly, for England’s sake, he must. The pining this week has been for some semblance of a cohesive offensive plan, but it is too late in the day for Southgate to make his a system team; all telepathic relationships and embedded patterns of play.
Southgate can help his players by rebalancing with some genuine width on the left, perhaps adding a little more creativity from Cole Palmer, but if England are to win this tournament they will do it by being superb in defence and relying on moments in attack.
For Real Madrid, Bellingham has proven himself a dab-hand at delivering in the biggest of those. Do likewise now, as the knockout stage begins, and his summer may yet live up to the inflated promise with which it began.
