England need 'dead' Bellingham to recover and deliver on the big stage

THREE matches into this European Championship, you could probably make a good 45-minute compilation of Jude Bellingham's highlights. Trouble is, they would all be from the same 45 minutes.

- Malik Ouzia

In a column on these pages on the eve of the tournament, one of my colleagues warned not to expect the world of a young man who turns 21 tomorrow and who arrived in Germany surely feeling the mental and physical toll of an historic first season at Real Madrid, which only ended in the Champions League Final at the start of this month.

Others, including Gareth Southgate, beat the same drum and, having fallen into this trap before, and with so much other extreme talent in the side to pin hopes on, there was even an acknowledgement among the wider fanbase that it need not be 'Jude or bust.

And then Serbia happened, Bellingham producing perhaps the most exciting half of tournament football from an England player since Wayne Rooney's breakout two decades before, and we all were guilty of allowing ourselves to wonder if, like so much else, the fickle laws of form and fatigue might not apply to our phenomenon.