England are up and running at the 2018 World Cup, but only just. Well, not exactly. Yes they left it incredibly late to score the winner, but they had already had the best collection of chances any team has mustered in Russia this week.

Harry Kane was the hero as he scored both goals, but that aside he did very little. That’s the life of an elite goalscorer I suppose, but without the points from his brace he’d be lurking in mid-table on our rankings chart for the match.





The next best England players according to Twelve were Maguire and Stones, but they don’t feel right either. In fairness to Maguire, he was more effective in the second half, but he was not great before the break. The Leicester City defender played a more advanced role as the match wore on, and four of his five important actions in the Tunisia half occurred in the second period.

As for Stones, while he did have a high quality opportunity in the first half, his attempt at scoring it was so bad he should probably have been docked points. No, to my mind England’s key player was Jordan Henderson.

Confession time: I support Liverpool. Kopites tend to have polarising opinions about their skipper, and I’m a fan, so no doubt this article is dripping in my blinkered biases. Even so, he wise widely praised in the BBC’s coverage of the match, and described as ‘exceptional’ by Gary Lineker. So what did he bring to this England performance? Let’s take a look.

It would be going too far to call him a deep lying playmaker (as he didn’t create any chances, for one thing), but as we can see on the dashboard he did play some fine long passes into attacking areas. Henderson only misplaced one of the seven long passes he attempted, and as we can see two of them found a colleague in the Tunisian penalty area. If Gareth Southgate values this passing ability, as he surely must, it’s hard to see how Eric Dier will displace Henderson from the XI. Next stop for the Three Lions is Panama on Sunday.