The picture from Mercedes-Benz Stadium on the first of July shows Declan Rice with an ice pack strapped to his hamstring, walking off after ninety-plus minutes in a stadium that had a roof and air conditioning and still felt, by his own description, like an oven. England had needed two Harry Kane goals in the last twenty minutes to get past DR Congo. Rice had given what he gave, in thirty-degree heat, in a knockout game, and when the BBC asked him how he was, he said what players in his position always say. "I'm fine. Good as gold. Good."

Ten days earlier, against Croatia, he'd come off with eighteen minutes left, limping, replaced by Morgan Rogers. Thomas Tuchel, a manager not given to sentiment about his best players, admitted afterwards that he'd taken Rice off purely as insurance, because Rice had reported pain in more than one place and Tuchel didn't fancy the alternative. Rice's own account was that it was "little neural pains" he'd been carrying since the back half of the Arsenal season. Earlier still, in a Guardian interview in June, he went further: nerve pain in a hamstring since Christmas, six months of it, managed rather than fixed, alongside a description of the fixture list as simply obscene. Three admissions, three different weeks, one hamstring.

The case for not worrying about any of this is Rice's own case, and it isn't a bad one. He's spent his career being underestimated physically and then correcting the record. He's talked before about a delayed growth spurt that left him looking, in his own words, out of his body until his late teens, and about the mobility that Arsenal's medical staff flagged as one of his outstanding attributes when he signed. He is twenty-seven, at the physical peak of a career built on durability rather than fragility. He played virtually every competitive minute of Arsenal's title-winning campaign, and Arsenal's own doctors will have signed off on him each time he took the field for England this summer, because those doctors have been managing this hamstring since Christmas and presumably know it better than anyone watching from a sofa in Islington. If your evidence for concern is a man saying he feels fine, and your source is the man himself, you are entitled to believe him.

Except an assurance repeated three times in six months about the same body part stops behaving like an assurance and starts behaving like a running total. "Good as gold" after Croatia. "Good as gold" after DR Congo.

In between, on the record, an admission that what's being managed is pain that's been there since December. That is not a player waving away a knock. It is a player describing a chronic condition in the only language available to him during a tournament, which is the language of reassurance, because the alternative — sitting out a World Cup — was never on the table and everyone in the conversation knew it.

None of this is new, and it would be a lie to pretend otherwise. Players have always played through things they shouldn't have at tournaments; Bryan Robson dislocated a shoulder at the 1986 World Cup and was still being talked into fitness tests days later. The instinct to trust the player's word over the visible evidence is as old as the summer tournament itself. The player has every incentive to say he's fine and the watching public has every incentive to believe him, right up until August, when the incentives change and it becomes somebody else's problem to manage.

That somebody, this year, is Mikel Arteta, who will get Rice back from a World Cup final push — should England go that far — with perhaps three weeks before a Premier League opener that Arsenal, on last season's evidence, cannot afford to treat as a soft landing. There is no reserve Declan Rice in that squad. Thomas Partey and Jorginho are gone. Whoever Arsenal have signed to sit in front of the back four will need time to learn what Rice does instinctively, and Rice himself will need time his body has not been given since Christmas.

What gets forgotten in every one of these summers is that the reassurance and the injury report are not in competition. Rice can be telling the truth about how he feels in the dressing room in Atlanta and still be walking into a Premier League season carrying six months of managed pain that hasn't gone anywhere, because pain managed is not pain resolved — it is pain postponed to whoever has him next. Arsenal don't own Declan Rice this summer. They inherit him.