52 min England 5-0 Panama
With all the caveats about how useless Panama have been defensively and in the final third, Sterling is playing very well, adopting some excellent positions and playing some penetrating passes. England have a throw on the right and give it to Loftus-Cheek who tries to round Escobar by the byline but is tackled. England corner. Panama;s defenders are warned again.
50 min England 5-0 Panama
Kane has the ball on halfway and Sterling hurtles out of the blocks beyond the defence when Kane releases it. Brilliant run but Kane's pass was too heavy. They had beaten the offside trap but the throughball was too close to Penedo who pelted out to win the race with Sterling.
John Stones's second and Harry Kane's second
And here's Harry Kane's second penalty. He went the same way but even if the keeper had it would have amputated his right hand at the wrist.
40 min England 4-0 Panama
Amazing. Henderson receives the pass on the edge of the penalty area back to goal and hooks a cross to Kane beyond the right post. He nods it across to Sterling whose header from a couple of metres is saved by Penedo and Stones is first to the rebound on the right and forces his header into the roof of the net.
36 min England 3-0 Panama
Lingard, battered from pillar to post for the first 15 minutes, glides in from the left to take Sterling's stabbed pass and bends a venomous shot from the left side of the D around the onrushing, panicking defenders and into the top right corner of the goal. This is a bit like England v Poland from 1986.
30 min England 2-0 Panama
England free-kick 35m out. Trippier will take. The break affords Murphy and Mowbray some time for golf banter. Trippier strikes it well, curling it deep beyond the back post where it is met by Maguire's run. He heads it back across goal and over the other post. He should have squared it to his team-mates in the middle or gone for goal but it turned into neither one thing or the other.
28 min England 2-0 Panama
Much better from Panama who enjoy a couple of minutes of sinuous movement and sharp passing. They work an opening through Cooper and Perez for Rodriguez to run on to a threaded pass in the box, to the left. He has Godoy peeling off his marker and free but lashes a shot from an acute angle into orbit. What a waste.
26 min England 2-0 Panama
Young penalised for kicking Cooper where the sun doesn't shine as he raised his leg to control a bouncing ball. Henderson hooks a lob over the back four for Sterling who wins it but was offside. Ruben Loftus-Cheek has been booked for a foul just after the third kick-off. Here's Kane putting the penalty in something my son and his schoofriends call 'top bins':
16 min England 1-0 Panama
For the third time Panama exploit hesitation from Young and Maguire on the left of England's defence to dial up the speed and shift the ball inside quickly. Barcenas, striding forward down the inside-left channel, meets the pass from Murillo and bends a left-foot shot that has Pickford scrambling across goal and diving but it trims the outside of the side-netting. Close, though.
12 min England 1-0 Panama
England lose possession cheaply from the free-kick, Maguire's poise and precision absent so far. Barcenas accelerates away from him and into the box. Walker clears up the first mess but England cause another that Panama's haste squanders. Walker's lunge stopped Perez tapping in at the back post.
5 min England 0-0 Panama
Panama take the free-kick into the box Kane heads clear and Barcenas wallops a 25m shot over the bar. Then Panama exploit the short goalkick and Maguire's poor pass to break down the left and find space for Godoy to shoot and he too thrashes it high and wide. Terrible finish but England invited the pressure with dozy play there.
1 min England 0-0 Panama
Panama 's huddle finally breaks up and England kick-off, attacking to the left and overloaded on the right flank. They roll it back to Stones and the three players on the right bomb forward but they play it short and move it to the left and back again. Trippier slips a pass past Davis and Loftus-Cheek rounds him.
The temperature is heading up 34C
Gareth Southgate says he will be using England's hydration strategy but there will be no official water breaks. On the Brexit scale 34C is 93F so he will have to employ his substitutes judiciously. "We think we will have the vast majority of the play, which is good in this heat, but we have to move the ball quickly and use width intelligently. The prize for today is to qualify with a game to spare but we have to concentrate on our performance. We need to be patient."
Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker
Have just embraced and jumped up and down, a la Chandler and Joey, in imitation of the excitement of the Panama World Cup panel. Them Shearer reveals that he has had a word with Harry Kane and told him to speak to the referee about holding at corners before they are taken.
Now the BBC is using Joy Divsion's Day of the Lords for a montage. I applaud their taste but it's sacrilege to have people talking over it. Music is to be listened to, not deployed as background.
Those starting XIs in black and white and their records
England (3-1-4-1-1) Pickford; Walker, Stones, Maguire; Henderson; Trippier, Loftus-Cheek, Lingard, Young; Sterling; Kane.
Panama (4-5-1) Penedo; Murillo, R Torres, Escobar, Davis; Barcenas, Cooper, Gomez, Godoy, J Rodriguez; Perez.
Referee Gehad Grisha (History)
The heat is oppressive
Jason Burt reports:
The air conditioning in the England dressing room has been turned up to the maximum ahead of kick-off against Panama in an attempt to keep the players as cool as possible before the game starts.
The players will also be given a fresh kit at half-time and iced towels to try and control their body temperatures with the temperatures on the pitch here in Nizhny Novgorod soaring towards the high 30 degrees celsius.
The England medical staff are confident that the air conditioning in the dressing room will help although there may be a concern that the dry air could affect the breathing of the players, especially those susceptible to asthma.
However the medics do not believe this will be a problem with dehumidifiers in use and, because the stadium is new, an air conditioning system which means it is ice cold inside the dressing room.
In previous matches in such conditions England have also used fans inside the dressing room with players wearing ice vests as they warmed up but the more light-weight training gear is believed to be sufficient this time. Sometimes kit is also sprayed with a cooling agent and water to also help.
A big issue will be hydration. Players will be urged to take on board as much fluid as possible and to hydrate at every opportunity during the match.
The design of the stadium means that around half of the pitch will be in shade at kick-off but heat will undoubtedly be a factor.
It may be roasting but Southgate's not taking off that weskit for anyone.
Deux bieres et un pastis, garçon, s'il-vous plait.
England make one change
Ruben Loftus-Cheek comes in for Dele Alli and will partner Jesse Lingard in the midfield duo ahead of Jordan Henderson. Raheem Sterling starts and Marcus Rashford will continue as an impact sub. He's a terrific talent, Rashford, but I can see the sense in employing his impact as a substitute and his understanding of the opportunities the role provides - he seems more aware of them than Sterling and his better control in tight areas can turn tired defenders. If Sterling does his job and keeps running hard down the channels, Rashford can cash in later on.
Panama avoid team sheet melodrama
By naming an unchanged XI for today's match 24 hours early:
Panama Penedo; Murillo, Roman Torres, Escobar, Davis; Barcenas, Cooper, Gomez, Godoy, Jose Luis Rodriguez; Perez. Substitutes Calderon, Cummings, Gabriel Torres, Diaz, Machado, Pimentel, Arroyo, Ovalle, Tejada, Avila, Baloy, Alex Rodriguez.
Pointers from the Belgium game - Murillo is pretty good, Roman Torres is an ox, Barcenas a snapper and young Rodriguez is going to be a fine player.
England fans begin to arrive at the stadium
Robert Mendick and Wil Crisp report:
"Travelling England fans have never been so middle-class. Nizhny Novgorod, a city on the Volga once so sensitive it was ‘closed’ to visitors in Soviet times, was laid siege on Saturday by a small army of England fans made up of lecturers, chartered accountants, investment bankers, company CEOs and the like.
[The game's gone]
Ruben Loftus-Cheek should make his first World Cup start
Here's what Ruud Gullit had to say about him last September:
"I always loved this guy, also when he was at Chelsea. I saw him playing yesterday as well.
“He’s so influential and I think the more he plays, the better he gets. He knows how to play his game, he knows how to go forward.
“I want him in the centre, he needs to have the ball. Technical, strong, he is a fantastic player. He is the one who has the brains.
“He’s a future England player, this one. I really believe in this boy, he’s a good player."
Here's what Paul Hayward has to say about his selection:
Team news
Matt Scott reports that England will make only one change rather than the anticipated two and that Raheem Sterling, scorer of 18 Premier League goals and provider of 11 Premier League assists en route to the title last year, has been retained in the starting XI. Read the full story here.
England's qualification game
In an intriguing twist to Wonderful World, Gareth Southgate adapted the words of Sam Cooke, Herb Alpert and Lou Adler to say history is not the important thing for this team’. Biology? Science book? The French they took? Word came there none. The only thing that matters, he says, is making their own history and they can certainly share an achievement today if they defeat Panama and join ‘Ron’s 22’ from 1982 and Sven’s band of Baden-Baden Charlie Big Potatoes from 2006 as England sides who have won their opening two group games at a World Cup.
The England manager, by contrast with his players, is a student of history (no word on geography, trigonometry, algebra or what a slide rule is for). Southgate is known to the friends he grew up with at Crystal Palace as ‘'Nord’, a name bestowed on him by Wally Downes, but it is one that reflects the observational sharpness of a dressing-room wit. The young Gareth, with his eight O-levels and relatively affluent upbringing in Crawley, contrasted markedly with his more cocky and shrewdly streetwise South London contemporaries in the Palace youth team.
His considered, unhurried way of speaking reminded Downes of Denis Norden, erstwhile co-writer of Take It From Here and a regular TV face hosting It’ll be Alright on the Night and speaking with his mouth full while selling Nuttall’s Mintoes. In an age when anyone in the game who spoke measuredly or enjoyed reading was instantly derided as ‘Prof’ or ‘Brains’, a descendant of the old Army contempt for ‘book learning’ characterised in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’s ‘Mr La-Di-Dah Gunner Graham’, ‘Nord’ was a cut above.
It stuck but his greenness did not. With the help of the goalkeeper Andy Woodman, the Hush Puppies and Ronnie Corbett golf sweaters that were so mocked behind his back were eased out and a lifelong friendship chronicled in a joint autobiography, Woody and Nord, nurtured them both. Southgate’s intelligence and application benefited him, too, and he became the youngest full-time captain in the country in 1993-94, the season he led Palace back into the Premier League.
After Palace’s relegation in 1995, Southgate left in the summer for Aston Villa where he expected to join Andy Townsend and Ian Taylor in his usual central midfield role. So did Brian Little, the man who signed him for £2.5 million, but a fortnight later could not resist buying Mark Draper when Leicester finally agreed to sell. Little, an underrated, strangely neglected manager, put him between Ugo Ehiogu and Paul McGrath in a back-three, a move so successful that England called him up after only eight games in the position.
When Des Walker lost his aura of impregnability in the early Nineties, England reverted to type at the back, ‘head-on-a-stick’ centre-halfs, as Gary Lineker called them, or export maypoles, the static object around which foreigners would dance. Terry Venables wanted something more progressive, a centre-back who was comfortable moving out of defence to pick up opponents attacking from deeper positions. Southgate flourished in the role and, despite the penalty miss in the Euro 96 semi-final that will forever shadow him, continued to perform astutely in Glenn Hoddle’s sides, never better than during the 0-0 draw with Italy that secured qualification for the 1998 World Cup.
His game continued to evolve well into his thirties, becoming as accomplished an orthodox central defender in a back-four as he had been in a three and it is a testament to his quality and durability that when Rio Ferdinand was banned for missing a drugs test in 2003, Sir Alex Ferguson immediately tried to sign the 33-year-old from Middlesbrough.
Looking back it seems obvious that he was born to manage but given that he has moved at the Football Association from Head of Elite Development to Under-21 head coach to England manager, it is odd to recall that he succeeded Steve McClaren at the Riverside without a Pro Licence, in the face of much opposition from the League Managers Association, and had to qualify on the job.
Southgate looks the model of a modern coach, even down to the DH Lawrence beard - cosmopolitan, flexible and cerebral. Yet there are echoes too of Malcolm Allison and Dave Sexton, whose undervalued toughness complemented their sprightly creativity and aptitude for teaching.
But don’t be fooled by appearance. Twice in the past he has identified that inspiration is key - first when he witheringly said of Eriksson’s half-time team-talk when England had just conceded a stoppage-time equaliser in the 2002 World Cup quarter-final: “We were expecting Winston Churchill and instead got Iain Duncan Smith.” And then again in 2006 when advocating a successor for Eriksson: “I want an Englishman who’s going to say: ‘Remember Churchill.’”
If anyone in Nizhny Novgorod hears strains of ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ delivered in the extraordinary, deliberate tones of Denis Norden this afternoon, there can be only one culprit: a man who continues to defy all preconceptions.
As for Panama, who fought bravely against Belgium, kettled them and hobbled them with some cynical and wild tackles, the 30C heat in the city once known as Gorky after Maxim, though Sorrento and Capri had similar claims over the writer, should have a greater toll on much older legs. They are a veteran side, a tough side and play with genuinely intimidating muscular athleticism. Any thoughts that they may trial a new approach here have been thoroughly debunked by their veteran defensive midfielder Gabriel Gomez. “We are men, we are aggressive,” he said. “Football is played with aggression, with desire. We are a team that knows how to play and when we have to fight, we fight.”
For all that, they are pretty enlightened technically if not always tactically and can open up a defence with decent movement - at no great pace - and some inspired passing angles. Against Belgium they were unable to commit runners consistently to help out their lone 37-year-old forward and settled for an attritional scrap that frustrated world-class talents such as Eden Hazard and Kevin De Bruyne and made them look pedestrian. It took a terrific strike from Dries Mertens to prise Panama’s vice-grip around their throats early in the second half after a stultifying first 45 minutes. Class will out but England and their supporters will have to be patient.