Around 48 minutes into Tuesday's musty, vaguely icky game – a game that felt like it was a few weeks past its sell-by date, a game that came coated in a thin, unidentifiable layer of mildew – Bukayo Saka got the ball in England’s right channel and played a simple short pass into Harry Kane. For all his current travails, the vagaries of form and fitness, Kane is nothing if not a fearsome striker of a football. When he really connects, as he did here, the ball simply explodes off his boot: all gunpowder and venom and pure, coiled power.
Two problems. First, Kane was facing away from goal. Second, he wasn’t actually attempting a shot but, in fact, trying to bring the ball under control.
At which point, a sequence of entirely logical but richly comic events unfolded. Kane’s heavy touch triggered the Slovenian press – albeit, not as much as Kane seems to have triggered the English press over the last week – and forced him scampering back towards his own goal. Benjamin Sesko got a foot in.
The ball ricocheted off his teammate Vanja Drkusic and bounced back into the path of Kane. Still retreating, Kane played an awkward hoik to Marc Guéhi, who passed it back to Jordan Pickford in the England goal. To any young strikers who happened to be watching: that is how you do it.
As long as by “it”, you mean “moving the ball 80 yards in a backwards direction as quickly and gauchely as humanly possible”. You can’t teach that kind of heavy control, but you can perhaps .