England 3 Ivory Coast 0 - Three Lions trio impress as sending-off makes it an easy night for Gareth Southgate’s men at Wembley

From that point on, the game became emptier than the heads of those Three Lions supporters who booed Harry Maguire before kick-off.

England stretched their unbeaten run to 22 matches with a 3-0 win that dawdled through the motions for 50 minutes but was encouraging before that.

From the moment inside the first minutes when a set of studs were planted into Ollie Watkins’ kneecap, it was clear England would do well to get through this alleged friendly without an injury, and the Ivorians without a red card.

The hosts appeared to get lucky but the visitors did not. Just 40 minutes in, visiting captain Serge Aurier, formerly of Tottenham Hotspur, was shown a second yellow card, diluting in an instant the test Gareth Southgate’s team were presented with.

A better referee than the inconsistent Erik Lambrechts would have been welcome too.

Southgate did not even get the penalty he wanted to see how someone other than Harry Kane would have coped, Fousseny Coulibaly ruled to have fouled Jude Bellingham less than a minute after coming on, only for the video assistant referee to twist his arm to reverse the decision. Can we not even be spared VAR in a friendly, for goodness sake?

It would, it must be said, have been a very soft one.

So was the red card, Aurier booked for trying and failing to pull down Watkins when the ball finally went out of play. In the 32nd minute he had been cautioned for pulling Jack Grealish’s shorts.

Playing for so long against 10 men, there was a limit to what Southgate could learn but he had already seen the potential of Bellingham as a No 10.

The Borussia Dortmund man was playing between Grealish and captain-for-the-night Sterling, and all three were outstanding.

Bellingham might have scored in the 16th minute but when he took the ball back from Sterling, Ali Sangare touched his shot onto the post. When the rebound was rolled across, the stretching Watkins’ studs were not long enough to convert the tap-in. That would come in the 31st minute.

Sterling showed an excellent combination of persistence and skill to win the ball and lay it on for Watkins making his first start along with Tyrick Mitchell.

The second came on the stroke of half-time when Grealish picked up the rebound from Sterling’s saved shot, and invited him to have another go.

The second half was only a minute old when Lambrechts pointed to the spot but when he correctly changed his mind, the game died a little as a spectacle until Tyrone Mings headed in a stoppage-time corner won by the lively former Huddersfield Town loanee Emile Smith Rowe.

By the 63rd minute nine of the 12 substitutions had been made and the fans were more interested in the progress of their paper aeroplanes than what little was happening on the pitch they were aimed at. Not for the first time, the moronic behaviour of a minority of England supporters filled the news vacuum.

“Nice to see your own fans booing you,” Wayne Rooney famously snarled down a camera lens at the 2010 World Cup.

“Nice to hear nothing’s changed,” he might have been saying last night.

It was Sheffield-born Maguire getting the treatment this time, jeered before he even took to the pitch. It was by no means the majority of the 73,405 crowd, but it was far too many.

The World Cup semi-finalist, Nations League semi-finalist and European Championship finalist had had the temerity to make himself available for selection for a March friendly when in poor form for Manchester United. If anyone should have been booed - and to be crystal clear, no one should have been booed - it was Southgate for selecting him. Maguire’s song was the most popular one during the European Championships but when the England band played the tune adapted to their fellow Sheffielder, few joined in until the second half.

When England players get abused by their own supporters, you wonder why they bother. Hopefully the centre-back was not thinking the same when he headed to bed.

Maguire had put in a solid 90 minutes without really being tested. That was the problem last night - too few in white were.

England: Pope; White (Walker-Peters 46), Maguire, Mings, Mitchell (Shaw 63); Ward-Prowse (Gallagher 79), Rice; Sterling, Bellingham, Grealish; Watkins. Unused substitutes: Forster, Henderson, Guehi, Coady, Foden, Mount, Kane, Pickford, Smith Rowe.

Ivory Coast: A Sangare; Aurier, Bailly (Agbadou 46), Deli, Kamara; Seri (Akouokou 90), Kessie; Pepe (Boly 46), Cornet (Konan 63), Gradel (Coulibaly 46); Haller (85). Unused substitutes: Cisse, Diallo, Kouassi, Kone, I Sangare, Konate.

Referee: E Lambrechts (Belgium).