The final whistle blows and players gather in the centre circle. Enmities are buried and old bonds reforged, pleasantries and shirts are swapped. Chloe Kelly is wrapped in the shirt of Leila Ouahabi. Likewise Jess Park and Laia Aleixandri. Sixty yards away, meanwhile, Grace Clinton is already on her lap of honour. She has resolved, with her characteristic speed of thought, that this shirt is going nowhere.
And if this was a game that seemed to arrive wreathed in ghosts of the past – Sydney, the pain, the bitter aftermath – then somehow it ended on a more optimistic, forward-looking note. This is an England team that have spent the past 18 months in varying states of entropy, labouring against the sort of opponents they should be swiping aside with a flick of the hand, torn between the Plan A that no longer works and the Plan B that does not yet exist.
