So Jude Bellingham must fight for a starting berth against Croatia next week, beginning with Tuesday’s training game against Costa Rica. Maybe the repulsion felt by Thomas Tuchel’s mother during the defeat by Senegal a year ago was more significant than the apology from her son that followed.
So much for the Bellingham sweet spot identified by Tuchel during the second half against New Zealand. The contest had all the intensity of a pilates-for-beginners class, yet Bellingham was so much better than any other player in red and utterly eclipsed his rival for the No 10 jersey, Morgan Rogers.
Unless Birmingham City were wrong to make him their youngest player at 16 and 38 days. Unless Borussia Dortmund were wrong to take him at 17, Manchester United wrong to try to get him at the same age and Real Madrid wrong to splash more than €100m on him at 20, Tuchel is in a class of one in seeing deficiencies in Bellingham.
Having laboured through 60 years of World Cup treacle it seems preposterous to be questioning the value of a player so obviously superior, so obviously of world class in the part of the pitch where control is established.
The quality quotient in Rogers is self-evidently high, too, but on the spectrum of the exceptionally gifted, Bellingham is England’s most precious commodity, a player to inspire his own and spread fear in the other.
Arsenal learned the perils of trying to win at elite level by subordinating the best of themselves to some crazed idea about containment, about sacrificing possession, and they had Declan Rice and Martin Odegaard in the middle against Paris Saint-Germain.
It feels like Tuchel is rehashing that age-old English distrust of the soloist, dragging us back into the realm of the honest trier. The award of vice-captaincy to Rice, who is straight out of central casting in his straight-backed, no-nonsense, indefatigable expression of Englishness, is another indication of Tuchel’s attitude towards Bellingham. It would appear the lad is just not for him.
Tuchel can’t beat Spain, France, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Portugal etc with his best player chained to a shrunken vision of what an England team might be. Some of us have spent a lifetime seeing good players turn to mush in England shirts, trapped by a sense of inferiority and an attachment to work-rate over expression.
Don’t let Bellingham, and as a consequence this team, become the unnecessary victims of that ancient trope. It is bad enough that the likes of Cole Palmer, Phil Foden, Adam Wharton, Jarrod Bowen and soon Rio Ngumoha, for that matter, are exiled in beachland without stifling England’s creative core further.
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Bellingham might indeed have attitude. If narcissism were ever a drag on performance, Ayrton Senna would have been cleaning cars, not racing them, Diego Maradona would have been serving pizzas in Naples, not eating them – and Cristiano Ronaldo might still be putting out deckchairs in Funchal.
The arrogance and disdain for lesser gods is probably a pathology that would see them locked up in other walks of life but in sport they are attributes that shatter norms and propel them into a dimension beyond the rank and file. Why sacrifice that if, properly harnessed, it can make the difference between winning and losing?
The English have experienced enough of the latter at the World Cup to know what it takes to fail.
The Three Lions might not win it with Bellingham. Without him they give themselves the best chance of falling. Again.
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