IT’S early days and he has to stay clear of injuries but Jude Bellingham has the ingredients to be the best England player you’ll ever see.

Just having him on the pitch is able to cancel out the curiosities which Gareth Southgate maintains: the most curious of which being his loyalty to Harry Maguire and Jordan Henderson, the latter being the guy who now wants the World Cup to be held in Saudi Arabia.

With such selections, Southgate comes across as a man who knows his barber doesn’t give him the cut he wants, but keeps going back month after month for fear of upsetting him. His cleaner hasn’t actually dusted for years but it would be rude to tell her.

Gaz man, Maguire is not going to urinate in your flowerbeds if he gets dropped.

He’ll be ok. You can play Lewis Dunk.

But back to Bellingham: it is a great feature of his rise to England’s best player that he hasn’t played in the Premier League, so nobody has to grudgingly support a player they spend most Saturdays singing rude songs about. We can all be on board the Bellingham boat without any sense of disloyalty.

A slightly less great feature, however, is that we are able to say that Bellingham could become the best of the best in an England shirt simply because – and I hate to break it to you – we’ve rarely had anybody in the top rank.

I was born at the end of the 1970s and have seen two players who might be able to claim they were in the world-class bracket.

Gazza, but he quickly bust himself. And David Beckham, that other fan of sending the World Cup to nations like Qatar.

Everybody else you may suggest was just good, or very good, excellent even, but never world class. What about Harry Kane? I won’t mention the penalty balloon job against France, but Kane, like Alan Shearer before him, never repeatedly tested himself at the highest level, season in, season out. They chose to be club heroes at Spurs and Newcastle, which is fine if that’s your funk, but nobody is closing their eyes and thinking: Messi, Ronaldo and then Harry Kane with 200 tap-ins.

In contrast, Bellingham has managed his career perfectly and slotted into the midfield of a European giant and is playing like he’s been there for 10 seasons. To command such respect at such an age is truly impressive. We can all be collectively jealous that our team didn’t scout him before the Germans arrived and took him to Dortmund.