Southgate still looking for key to unlock City form in Foden

FIVE MINUTES gone at Wembley, and in the sunshine in front of a socially distanced crowd, Phil Foden, hair dyed a la Paul Gascoigne on the same patch at Euro 96, shimmies inside a Croatian defender and curls towards the far corner to launch the summer he intends, even expects, to make his own.

- Malik Ouzia

Except rather than find that corner to give England their opening goal of Euro 2020, the ball comes back off the post. Instead, a little over an hour later, Raheem Sterling scores the game's winning goal and goes on to be the campaign's star.

To call the miss a sliding doors moment would perhaps be to offer it undue providence for what came next, but it is true that from that point Foden's tournament never really caught alight.

He started the next group game, the soggy 0-0 with Scotland, then lost his place through a complicated set of circumstances; a suspension risk, Mason Mount's Covid isolation and Bukayo Saka's breakthrough. Eventually, his tournament was ended by a training-ground injury that ruled him out even of a place on the bench for the final.

And so it is understandable that already, after one peripheral outing against Serbia, there are fears that for English football's player of the year, this European Championship might spiral the same way; a shirt lost to, maybe, Anthony Gordon, an international career still selling itself short.