With 28 minutes gone in Gelsenkirchen, Declan Rice headed a bouncing ball in the direction of Jude Bellingham, who waited and then did something extraordinary, arching his back and roundhouse‑pinging it across the pitch into the centre‑backs, with a sense in that moment of complete mastery of his craft, the day, this entire high‑stakes pursuit everyone else in here seems so anxious about.
It was the kind of pass you might attempt with a tennis ball against a classroom window, or while doing balloon keep-ups at Christmas; a pass to express the strange physical theatre of being in possession of such an excess of talent, even among the excessively talented.
