Kane scored from the spot. Then we all watched a screen to find out if it counted.

England's tournament began, fittingly, with an argument. Harry Kane stepped up against Croatia on Wednesday night, saw his penalty saved — and then watched the referee, prompted by the video booth, order it retaken because the goalkeeper had come off his line. Kane scored the second one. It was his 80th England goal and his first of this World Cup, and for a few seconds before it was given, the whole country was watching not the players but a screen, waiting.

That wait is the texture of this tournament. The lawmakers at IFAB have handed the video assistant referee a longer reach this summer: it can now review a wrongly awarded corner, a second yellow card, a case of mistaken identity. New rules curb goalkeepers' time-wasting and even punish certain gestures. The goalkeeper-encroachment rule that did for Kane's first effort is the same one that knocked Scotland's women out of a World Cup back in 2019 — so it is not new, exactly. It is just everywhere now, and enforced.

Here is what I keep noticing, and what makes this England's most peculiar tournament to watch together. The big shared moment is no longer the goal. It is the pause before the goal — the held breath while a few people in a room somewhere review the footage and decide what the rest of us just saw. The crowd in Dallas booed a mere hydration break; you can guess what they make of waiting on a screen. We still gather to watch together, as we always have. We just spend more of the evening watching a verdict load.

For the British viewer there is a second oddity on top. Because the tournament is in North America, England play late: Wednesday was a nine o'clock kick-off, with Ghana next Tuesday and Panama the Saturday after, both at night. So the ritual now is to stay up, gather, and then, at the decisive moment, fall silent and wait for a machine to tell you whether to celebrate. The country is doing this together, in the dark, on a delay.

I am not going to pretend a retaken penalty is a parable about automation. But it is hard, watching it, not to notice that the job of being the final word — the referee's whole authority — has quietly moved off the grass and into a booth, and that we have learned to wait for it without much complaint. The decision still gets made. It is just made somewhere we cannot see, from a recording. Football got there first. It will not be the last thing we watch a screen to confirm.

England won, by the way: four-two, Bellingham and a sharp Rashford finish alongside Kane's two, the kind of opening night that sends a country to bed happy. We will do it again on Tuesday — late, together, and, again, watching the screen.