First came a header, almost violent in its simplicity, rising like a basketball jumper taken too early in the possession, instinct before structure had time to form. Then a strike that seemed to leave the boot without asking permission from anything like doubt, arcing hard and flat into the net, the kind of finish that keeps the old nickname alive: Hurricane.
England were untidy again, not quite slow, not quite fast, stuck in that in-between space where good teams start to look ordinary. The Democratic Republic of the Congo did not arrive as tourists. They pressed when it suited them, dropped when it didn’t, and for long stretches the match felt less controlled than England would have liked to admit. There was a moment, just after the hour, when the stadium noise tilted slightly their way, as if the result had forgotten to be settled.
It would have become one of those World Cup nights people keep replaying for reasons that are not entirely tactical had Harry Kane not condensed everything into a small, brutal interval. Five minutes, two goals, and the match no longer asking questions. Qualification in the end, but not comfortably, not cleanly, and Mexico waiting in the next round with a kind of polite threat.
For the England captain, those were goals four and five of this tournament. His season ends on 72 in all competitions, a number that sits there almost stubbornly. Only Lionel Messi, with 82 in 2011/12, has gone higher in the modern era. It doesn’t really explain him, though. Kane has passed the point where numbers describe him properly. They just sit around him now. At Bayern Munich he looks like a player who arrived slightly late to his own authority. Tottenham still hangs in the background of his profile in a way that never fully resolves itself, not even now, more a habit of thinking than a footballing memory.