Everything This World Cup Will Be Remembered for

It's a weird and in-built deficiency the World Cup possesses that, by the time it arrives at its climax, the final can often feel like an afterthought. What begins in a flurry of camp pageantry and intrigue – another tournament summer, returning like an old friend after its two-year mosey through the abyss – ends invariably in a diminished and depleted state, race run, minerals spent, narrative arcs vanishing like rainbows at sunset.

In fact, there's probably a pretty convincing argument to be made that the World Cup Final is the most tedious game in all of world football, a celebration of dead possibilities, with all those hopes and dreams guillotined, the ambitions of 32 sides and nations siphoned away to a greedy winner of one. As a spectacle, it can feel oddly lonely and pyrrhic, the equivalent of the drinking game Paul Merson and Gazza would play in their shared hotel room on Middlesbrough away days, swigging red wine with a sleeping pill chaser till one of them passed out. Last man conscious, wins. But wins what, exactly?

The answer for France is far more obvious, and this year no one would dare to call the final game dull. Croatia were great, putting on a Sunday matinee showcase of the qualities that had got them this far in the first place: doggedness, drive, a certain brutal precision in the clinches. But in the end they were seen off by a France team that, since the amniotic stupor of that last 16 game against Denmark, have finally seemed interested in exploring the vast outer reaches of their own prodigious talents. Kylian Mbappé Lottin: the world, and the stars, are yours.

It was Mbappé who produced arguably the most thrilling individual display of Russia 2018 in a quarter-final that he appeared to play in a mode of pure predation, hanging on the last shoulder of whichever Argentinian defender seemed at that moment like the weakest of the pack, the most ready to die. The bursts that won France a penalty and then a free-kick on the edge of the box in the first half in Kazan spread a mortal fear through the opposition defence, Mbappé a wolf who had somehow found its way into the Argentinian panic room.

It was that game, too, that saw the tournament's best goal, French right-back Timothée Chalamet sending a half-volley off the outside of his boot that seemed to be singing something to itself as it made its way to the net, a goal that will continue to get better as the years tick by and poignancy accrues. Oh, oh woe-a-whoa is me / the first time that you touched me.

It was that balmy Saturday afternoon that really marked and defined the tournament, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes of modern football, crashing out in the space of six hours and killing off any lingering hopes that one of them could win a World Cup and finally put to bed the ceaseless argument over which should be remembered as the best. That was the day it stopped being about their seemingly preordained quarter-final showdown and started being the tournament that will be remembered for ushering in the sport's next era, one blissfully lacking the Messi-Ronaldo complex, the yanking open of an exhilarating new vacuum in which Mbappé, Kevin De Bruyne, Neymar, Sergej Milinkovic-Savic, José Maria Giménez, Aleksandr Golovin, Dávinson Sánchez, Paulo Dybala, Marco Asensio, Harry Maguire and any number of others will hope to thrive in a way that is decisive for their respective countries.

It was encouraging just how big a part England were able to play in all this. Their passage was aided, certainly, by a relatively easy draw, and there was good fortune too in the basic pragmatic upsides of being drawn not in Groups A or B, but G. World Cups are always more fun when everyone else has to play before you do; even as a neutral, the matches are laced with the added kick of watching someone you might bump into a little further down the line. Having the game you care about most at the end of each round of fixtures also seems to stretch the tournament out, extending its humid span across the summer – that first, last-ditch win over Tunisia genuinely feels like it happened a lifetime ago, Russia's curtain-raising 5-0 demolition of Saudi Arabia something that we can sadly now only communicate with via an upturned glass and a haunted wooden board with the alphabet, some numbers and the words "yes" and "no" carved into it.

How else and for what will history remember this tournament, which seemed to take place in its own emotional microclimate, insulated somehow from the complex political strife and social upheaval taking place within its host territory and all across the world?

The memories will be of VAR; of Russia's running men and the audacity of Cheryshev; of Manuel Neuer stranded and haunted by the karmic spectre of all that stolen lunch money; of Aliou Cissé's lion paws and the wingspan of Jo Hyeon-Woo. It will be remembered for Mo Salah's impatient tears; Belgium 3-2 Japan; the belated consensus crowning of Diego Godín and the storm cloud of global mob seethe aimed at Neymar; for double-headed Albanian eagles, memes, Panamanian penalty madness and the regrettable early departures of Peru, Iran, Nigeria, Senegal and Serbia. It will be remembered for Ante Rebic's lack of mercy and Willy Caballero's return to the bench, for Jordan Pickford's celestial thwarting of Mateus Uribe, for Spain 3-3 Portugal, De Bruyne versus Brazil, the irrepressible FIFA pervcam, Maradona's cocaine windows and Domagoj Vida's disgusting haircut.

It will be remembered for all the things that didn't happen – English recriminations, anxious glances at the roots and branches, market town effigies – and the things that did: Southgate you're the one, Slabhead, performative lager tossing, writing your own story, reviving old songs. It will be remembered for the pace of Mbappé and Milad Mohammadi's aborted forward-roll injury-time throw-in, Robbie Williams' oligarch sex yacht, Michy Batshuayi smashing the ball into his own face off the post, the midges of Volgograd and that bloke up a lamppost dry-humping a traffic light in the middle of heatwave-heavy central London, snorting cocaine off his house keys as a Met police riot van lurked ominously a few yards away, the purest distillation there was, perhaps, of the tournament's ability to arouse and supply the insatiable urge for more, more, more, more, more.

Most of all, it will simply be remembered: the greatest World Cup of them all, they are all saying, at least until the tournament summer is back on your doorstep again, clad in that same wry grin, boots covered in strange muck, exuding that familiar sense that this just might be the most vital and magical of all our old, stupid rituals.

@hydallcodeen

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