Sport: it just keeps on trying to tell you things. On a gripping, clammy, oddly distracted night in Belgrade, England and Serbia produced what felt at times like a twin-track spectacle, a perfect embodiment of the idea of elite sport as a kind of theatre that takes place while the world burns around it.
There seemed to be two quite different things happening in the same timeline. In the first of these, the official spectacle, England produced an expertly controlled away performance, in the process all but sealing qualification for the World Cup. This was a Morgan Rogers story, a Thomas Tuchel finds his moment story, the transition from joyless wiry German death-football technocrat to fun wiry German tactical rainmaker.
