This was football as a waiting room: lots of polite shuffling, no one actually called your name. England passed it sideways with the confidence of people who knew where the goal was but refused to commit to the directions.

Ghana, to their credit, turned defending into performance art. They parked, organised, and dared England to find an angle that did not exist. Every promising England move ended the way a sneeze does, big build-up, then nothing.

Nil-nil is sometimes a war and sometimes a nap. This one leaned toward nap. The final whistle felt less like a result and more like the merciful end of a meeting that should have been an email.