Sport: it just keeps on trying to tell you things. On a gripping, clammy, oddly distracted night in Belgrade, England and Serbia produced what felt at times like a twin-track spectacle, a perfect embodiment of the idea of elite sport as a kind of theatre that takes while the world burns around it.
There seemed to be two quite different things happening in the same timeline. In the first of these, the official spectacle, England produced an expertly controlled away performance, in the process all but sealing qualification for the World Cup. This was a Morgan Rogers story, a Thomas Tuchel finds his moment story, the transition from joyless wiry German death-football technocrat to fun wiry German tactical rainmaker.
The second event, running in concert, was the sight of strange goings on in the Serbian crowd that seemed to have very little to do with football but which looked quite a lot like the silencing of dissent in real time.
The entire twin-track timeline was captured in eight second-half minutes. With the game already beginning to stagger towards its end point like a wounded bison, England went 3-0 up. The goal was made by a goalkeeping blunder, a ricochet off Marc Guéhi’s chest, and a loose ball smashed in by Ezri Konsa. Serbia were that kind of opponent by this point, ready to collapse like an over-dunked digestive biscuit whenever England pressed with any precision.
Then on 60 minutes the home fans produced the first really loud, unified noise of the night, jumping up and down around the stadium and joining in a chant that was roughly translated as “jump if you’re not that keen on the president”. There had already been shouts and songs expressing disapproval of Aleksandar Vucic’s Progressive Party. This was concerted stuff. Who knows exactly what happened next, or what the sequence of events was. But on 65 minutes the riot police rolled into a section of the crowd that had been singing among the loudest, and that was already breaking out into skirmishes, a rush of men in black T-shirts, people escaping on to the pitch even before the shields and helmets arrived.
The black-shirted men had been roaming the ground for reasons of their own. Locally there had been vague rumours of spotters in the crowd looking for undesirable noise. The Serbian FA had tried to switch the game to a smaller and more easily controlled base outside Belgrade, reported for reasons of internal security. And by the end they pretty much got their wish as huge numbers of the home fans filed out, the energy by that points strange, sour and above all utterly flat.
England’s support jammed into a pie-slice section at one end of the Rajko Mitic Stadium. Photograph: Bradley Collyer/PA
In the buildup to the game there was a lot of talk about potential racist abuse of England’s players, most of it sparked by questions about the potential racist abuse of England’s players. But Serbia has its own problems right now. On the eve of this game there were protests in Belgrade, thousands of mainly young people chanting about the suppression of free speech and police brutality, the use of gas, rubber bullets and rape threats against female students during recent anti-government protests.
And from the start here there was a sense of distraction about the home crowd. The Rajko Mitic Stadium is a gorgeously sullen low-rise concrete bowl, with stark military-grade light towers at each corner. England’s support was jammed into a pie-slice section at one end, ringed by police with shields, rifles, pistols, batons, helmets – perhaps the most impressively tooled-up detail ever to escort a bunch of semi-retired middle-aged plumbers from Kent on a late summer jolly.
At 7.33pm UK time we heard the first muffled chants of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”. Both anthems were whistled. With seven minutes gone “Kosovo-Serbia” echoed across the pitch in a call and response, the kind of thing of which Uefa tends to take a dim view.
For a while nothing much happened. Behold, England, the aspirin of world football. We will ease your pain. The bad feelings will go. All the feelings will go. Then with 27 minutes gone Rogers produced three brilliant pieces of creative attacking play from the No 10 position to break open the game. First he was found by Guéhi’s swift forward pass, showed wonderful power and vision to roll his man, nudged Noni Madueke into space, and watched as Harry Kane’s shot was deflected wide.
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Another twist, another pass, and Anthony Gordon was in for a shot. Kane then put England ahead with a wonderful header. And England’s second goal after 34 minutes was just a lovely moment of fluent collective vision, one of those third-eye moments, made by Madueke running right back into the centre circle, snapping a pass to Elliot Anderson, then setting off on a sprint that told his teammates where to go.
Anderson read the moment and played a quick pass in to Rogers, whose nonchalant little flick back into Madueke’s path was a thing of beauty, a little bit of art, show, playfulness, easing his standing leg out of the way and flicking the ball past the last line of defence. From there the finish was expertly pinged high into the net. In those moments Rogers’s qualities were all there: strength, awareness, touch, the ability to freeze the moment and feel the planets circling around him. It was already clear he is an excellent creative player. Here he was utterly fearless.
And so this was a good night for Tuchel. Perhaps Tuchel has even found his Big Thing with England. Teamwork, hunger, speed alongside Kane. Reece James has re-secured the right-back position. Some had perhaps forgotten how good he is. Anderson was very good in midfield. He made the odd mistake early on, forgot about it, came back. All of this is doubly promising.