At one point, Jude Bellingham took a fresh-air kick at an imaginary target - at another point, he turned and gave Gareth Southgate a frustrated look.
And then he stood theatrically with arms outstretched as if to ask the entire stadium what was going wrong. The Ballon d’Or contender was not in a golden mood and he was not the only one.
Jordan Pickford’s jersey was orange, his face was regularly red with something approaching fury. To be honest, Pickford is often like that - most goalkeepers are - but his anger was at the sloppiness in front of him, at the times when defenders chose to shuttle the ball towards him rather than be a touch more ambitious.
Look, England are through to the last 16 and that is all that matters and the players will form an orderly queue over the next couple of days to highlight teams who have won tournaments after underwhelming group-stage campaigns.
But the frustration shown by Bellingham, Pickford and by others for long periods of this match does not bode well for their knockout campaign.
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Ahead of kick-off, Southgate would have allowed himself a wry smile as the results of the tea-time matches filtered through. France not winning? Holland getting cuffed by the Austrians and finishing third in their group?
Tournament football is no walk in the park for the heavyweight units, as the England manager never tires of telling us. And he is right, of course. There really are no easy games at this level.
Questions will continue to be asked of Southgate's tactics (2024 Anadolu)But whatever the scoreline, England fans want to see more adventure, they want to see more risk-taking, they want to see some sort of attacking plan, they want to see flair.
And for considerable periods of this contest in Cologne - especially in the first half - they got none of those. We were promised high intensity. It rarely happened. We were promised hard pressing. It rarely happened. We were promised in-your-face football. It rarely happened.
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The caveat, of course, must always be that it is results that matter and England have qualified for the knockout stages of another tournament.
But the concerning - and, to be fair, most surprising - aspect of all three group stage performances is that this current England team looks as though it is not being coached brilliantly. And Steve Holland and Southgate are very, very good coaches. We are not individual, one-on-one coaching, but the coaching of systems.
Harry Kane rues a missed chance against Slovenia (2024 AMA Sports Photo Agency)Bellingham looked as though he had little idea of what he or others were supposed to be doing. Prior to the game, Declan Rice and Kane hinted that they had worked on a new pressing routine.
If they had, the work is clearly not finished. For the entire first half, there was little coordination in their harassment of the Slovenian defensive unit and, on a basic level, too many times when players simply seemed to get in each other’s way. For much of the game, there was confusion where there should have been combinations.
At times, it seemed as though Bellingham was drifting to the left to try and set up a rapport with Foden but the idea paid few dividends.
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In a way, the outcome of this game was relatively irrelevant and the second half performance was a good deal better than the first half performance. So many results in Germany have shown that no-one can either be under-estimated or overestimated.
This is a wide open Euro 2024 and you would be a brave man or woman to back a winner at this stage. And, as they prepare for their last-16 challenge, you would certainly have to be a brave man or woman to back England.
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