Is there anything more uplifting in sport than the glorious explosions of a new talent? Is there anything quite so depressing as one that offers so much and grows so large, only to implode under its own weight?
They are sensations that prefer to live apart, but not this week. Not when one remarkable midfielder was laying the markers of greatness with his feet and did so as a predecessor of some renown was finding that his own had been planted in a bucket of raw sewage.
Paul Pogba was Jude Bellingham once.