World Cup 2018: Incisive and intelligent, Jesse Lingard remains integral to England's hopes in Russia

Harry Kane may have scored the goals but England don't possess anyone quite as important to Gareth Southgate's system as the Manchester United midfielder

You have to wade back through quite a few events, and plenty of emotions, to get back to the most rewarding, important part of Monday night’s opener for England. Past the Harry Kane show, through the long slow second half, past the VAR controversies, the substitutions, and the Tunisian penalty.

All the way back to those first 25 minutes when England played the football Gareth Southgate promised, bold and attacking, and threatened to cut Tunisia to shreds. And in that spell Southgate was proven thumpingly right on one of his biggest calls of all: building the team around the instincts, intelligence and nimbleness of Jesse Lingard.

Southgate has been a fan of Lingard’s clever runs for years and has always picked him whenever he had the chance to, for the Under-21s and now for the seniors. While many of his selections for this England team - Kane, Dele Alli, Raheem Sterling - are obvious, Lingard is not. It is the closest the meticulous Southgate comes to a punt, or a hunch.

But Southgate wants movement, options, clever interchanges in tight spaces, and that is why he has built the team this way, a 3-5-2 with two attacking number 8s, playing between the lines and running in behind. Lingard spoke engagingly in Repino last week about the job, how he learnt to sense space as a boy because he was too small for tackles, and how he has watched Andres Iniesta to see how he intuits where the space might be. Now this England team is built around him and Dele Alli, their two-chambered heart.

And in the evening heat of Volgograd on Monday Lingard revelled in the role as England’s most important player. They have no-one else as good at making those mischievous runs in behind, off the ball, behind the last defender, waiting for the pass. Twice in the first few minutes he cut Tunisia open like that, and they struggled to come to terms with his movement. It was only in the second half, when Tunisia dropped deeper, that Lingard did not have that same space to attack and England could not play how they wanted.

There will be criticism, of course, for Lingard’s finishing. He shot straight at the keeper after two minutes, miscued one far post volley, another chance from a good position and hit the outside of the post, racing characteristically in behind and just getting a touch on the ball before the advancing keeper. In truth he should have flown back to St Petersburg last night with more goals than Harry Kane.

Lingard didn't get on the scoresheet but still did his part (Getty Images)

But that does not mean we should get too hung up on the more contingent, random elements of Lingard’s impressive all-round game. Playing well is the point, and Lingard certainly did that. His movement and skill created chances for the team even if he might have done better with some of the openings that fell to him. A few inches or degrees one way or the other and next time they will go in.

Football is a team game and everyone has a job in Southgate’s system. Responsibilities that are fundamentally more important than finishing, which is just one skill among many, with plenty of variance and external factors at play. There is already clamour for Ruben Loftus-Cheek to start against Panama after an impressive late showing on Monday, tightening up a tempo that had started to sag. Loftus-Cheek is certainly an eye-catching player, for his ability to burst past opponents and his technical skill. Dele Alli will have to be assessed after pulling up in the first half and struggling on until he was eventually replaced.

But surely any change cannot come at the expense of Lingard. To obsess over the chances he missed is to miss the point again: that he is one of the men who makes this system work, with selfless, intelligent, incisive play, all the qualities that Southgate identified in him years ago. England’s best spell in Volgograd was Lingard’s best spell too and it is already difficult to imagine, just one game into this campaign, England hitting their highest level without their impish midfield scurrier showing them the way.