England have made us all football consumers – so best just give in to it | Andy Bull

World Cup run has become so utterly irresistible that other sports are contorting their schedules to fit in with kick-off

The woman who lives at No 42 says she knew, just bloody knew, that Eric Dier was going to score his penalty as soon as he stepped up to take it. The two guys in the dry cleaners can’t agree on whether Raheem Sterling should be in the team or not. The kid next door has been practising Three Lions on the piano. The bus driver’s whistling it. A friend emails a meme he’s made of the song playing over the top of the dance scenes from the Big Lebowski. I Google “how to lose an earworm”. Dad, who hasn’t watched a match since Trowbridge Town folded back in ‘98, texts to say how much he’s enjoying it all. The lunacy gets infectious.

All the best summer stories are set in a heatwave. It was 30C in London last Saturday but felt hotter, like “the sun was a huge fifty-cent piece that someone poured kerosene on and then had lit a match,” Richard Brautigan wrote, “and said, ‘Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,’ and put the coin in my hand but never come back”. Everything is a little woozy and delirious and feverish and a bunch of nutters have invaded IKEA and the Band of the Coldstream Guards are playing that song at Buckingham Palace and no one’s entirely sure whether this is actually a dream maybe. It just might be. It has all the logic of one. Has anyone checked to see if the spinning top’s stopped?

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