Others may have gone missing, but the goalkeeper has been Southgate’s most reliable player in Germany

Perhaps the most striking part of England’s quarter-final victory against Switzerland in Düsseldorf was the sense of contrast. For large parts of normal and extra time England once again played like a team here under sufferance.

This was another awkward dance without music, a facsimile of how elite clubs play, footballers out there trying to run the patterns, then remembering that, actually, there are no patterns.

He created an environment in which players could flourish yet Gareth Southgate has become a lightning rod for rage

They have a word for it in German: der Briefcasetrainerparadigm, a phrase used to describe a person who is self-evidently good at what they do, but who is still universally regarded as a disaster.

OK, there is no such actual word word. The phrase “there’s a German word for it” is in itself a longstanding red flag, what the Germans call a Fake-Deutsche-Langeswort-Intro. But the concept of how exactly to define or put a scale on success feels very current as Gareth Southgate prepares his team to face Switzerland on Saturday evening in Düsseldorf.

While Uefa looks at the player’s crotch-grabbing antics, Gareth Southgate must harness his game-changing instinct

It’s day 19 in the Euro 2024 Haus. Cristiano Ronaldo has finally pared his entire on-field performance down to a series of viral reaction memes. German police are to be given tasers and sniper rifles to deal with a raised threat of beaming, selfie-grabbing children whose parents need to have a look at themselves. And a formal investigation is under way into whether Jude Bellingham grabbing his imaginary balls really is a private joke among his friends or an insult to Slovakian manhood.

In fact only one of these statements is demonstrably true at the time of writing. But it does raise many other lines of inquiry. What kind of investigation is this exactly? What kind of friends are we talking about here? And what is the chance any sanction for breaching “decent human conduct” (Uefa translation: racism, arguably no; dick gesture, zero tolerance) will be delayed until after the tournament’s second most famous man is safely packed off somewhere else?