Please, England: Don't Make Us Go Home to Reality

Here it comes. Don't flinch now. England go into a World Cup semi-final against Croatia tonight that has already been played countless times in the minds, guts and mouths of tens of millions of people, every possible twist and permutation envisaged, each route to glory, failure or – let's face it; This Is England – glorious failure mapped out mentally and emotionally in advance.

This is what makes football more than just a game or televisual entertainment: the fact that it really exists not on the pitch or screen itself, but in a massive, sentient storm cloud of thought and talk that drifts across the globe, periodically settling above anyone brave or stupid enough to try to alter its course.

Tonight, the dream-cloud that is football will make its way to the Luzhniki Stadium southwest of Moscow's city centre, a vast and ominous condensation of betting slips, livestream chat box taunts, conversations with the neighbours and the Post Office clerk, Fantasy Football captain boosts, fountain dances, post-eccy fever dreams, therapy bills, baby namings, bus climbs, break-ups and booze runs.

Tonight is a game that has been taking place not just in the minutes, hours and days since that bloodless victory over Sweden, or even since we entered the right-hand side of the draw after waving farewell to Group G a little under two weeks ago. Tonight's game has been playing out for 28 long years in the collective imagination of a country that loves football and its gathering clouds like no other torture device on the market. Tonight is merely the night when we have the luck to watch the game enter its last two hours, when all the talking is done and you can only wait and look for the clouds to part, hoping for all the world that destiny is the density of Harry Maguire's head.

Tonight, Matthew, I am become Slabhead: destroyer of worlds.

All of which is to say that for all the modern obsession with post-match analysis, scapegoats, heat maps and root-and-branch reviews, football is better to anticipate than dwell upon, a dream in the imagination that dies and revives itself over and over again. And we have to be ready for death tonight, for the end of all this; the noise and humidity, the momentum and sense of something building that for once feels both benevolent and bigger than us all, a mass cultural moment for a mass culture that for too long has been bound together only by satire and division, an apathy for the status quo and a confusion of where to go next, like a marriage choking slowly on an out-of-date roadmap in the cockpit of an affordable family car. We have to be ready for death, always. The Luzhniki's name translates roughly into English as "the meadows", which if nothing else seems like a reassuringly bucolic place for this England tournament summer to come to its final rest.

Alternatively, though, we could just go and win the whole thing. And really, why shouldn’t we do that? No one else really seems to want to, at least not as much as us.

In 12 hours time, after the easy chaos of the groups and the bargained passage through the early knock-outs, England will enter the third and potentially most joyous stage of their World Cup voyage so far: Gareth Southgate's Underdog Zone. England may be ranked above Croatia according to FIFA's official metrics, but no one watching as the group stages were completed would have made them favourites for tonight's tie, Zlatko Dalić's side's disposal of Argentina in particular summoning forth the weary ghosts of technically gorgeous, slow-death midfield play that have spooked England into failure so many times in the past. Luka Modrić will have to be suffocated, deprived of the oxygen he needs to shift and shunt and trivela his name into the history books, while in Mario Mandžukić, Ante Rebić, Ivan Perišić and Ivan Rakitić Croatia possess an attacking threat so tireless and mobile it seems stupid to pin all English wishes on the hope that they'll be knackered by the two penalty shoot-out victories that have carried them this far.

Beyond Croatia wait France, who were talked up pre-tournament as being capable of thrashing England purely with players they’ve left at home. The downside of having a relatively easy path to the semi-finals is that we still don't really know how good England are, how they’ll fare in the clinches against sides that are ostensibly superior to them. For all the catharsis of the penalty shoot-out victory over Colombia, there remains the caveat that the opposition were without their best player, and the spectre of James Rodríguez will only loom larger if Modrić – another world-class playmaker – is able to carve England open at will this evening.

The flip-side of that is the suspicion that England may well perform better and more expansively against a side built to rely on its own attacking impetus, the midfield runners more able to detect those spaces-in-behind that ultimately turn these big matches, define footballing epochs. Victory in itself is all well and good; it's victory against the tide – and all the euphoria and symbolism that would bring – that this country has always really yearned for.

Throughout this tournament, the same words have been thrown repeatedly at Gareth Southgate's chicken-chucking sixth-formers: fresh, young, free, untarnished. All are basically synonyms to describe a team yet to prove itself the true equal of anyone left in these rarified zones. If this campaign to date really has felt like a lads' holiday that has got wildly out of hand, a coming-of-age film about a group of young and likeable Brits Abroad, England are about to find themselves yanked from the easy hedonism of the strip into moments more pivotal, gatecrashing some local mafioso's penthouse suite to cut the biggest deal of their lives after finding a big bag of drugs in a bush, hoping to negotiate the safe return of a kidnapped Danny Welbeck in the process.

It can be hard to remember, when the World Cup is still on and the heatwave is forecast to last to the horizons of the iPhone weather app, that England remains the country of grey drives home from the airport, of sprints between the awnings of rain-lashed high street banks, of pub carpets ruined by sod and the smell of wet dogs getting older and sadder on the bottom deck.

Tonight, it might get easier to remember that England. Or it may not, and the holiday may go on. Whatever happens, your mind and your gut are no doubt telling you it's time for the talking to cease, to hush up. Here it comes. Remember not to flinch. The cloud, and the rush, are coming.

@hydallcodeen

See here for more coverage of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.