England meet Ghana tomorrow, and a country that woke to a departing Prime Minister goes looking for something to agree on

There are mornings a country would rather be done with by nightfall, and Monday was one of them. By tomorrow evening it will have somewhere else to put its attention: England against Ghana, the second game of the group, under the lights.

It should not matter. Twenty-two people, a ball, a result that changes nobody's Wednesday. And yet a fixture like this does the strange, serious work that sport always does. It hands a few million people, who agree on almost nothing this week, one thing to want together for ninety minutes. After the morning the country had — a Prime Minister on his way out, a contest to come, the long uncertain summer of it — that is not nothing. It is close to a public service.

England arrive in good order. The win over Croatia that opened the tournament, four goals scored and two conceded, the whole country briefly in one room, bought them confidence and a little room for error. Ghana arrive as Ghana tend to: a side English supporters carry an odd, affectionate wariness towards, capable of the sublime and the heartbreaking inside the same half, rarely the team a ranking says they are. The Black Stars have a habit of turning the game that looks like a formality into the one you still talk about years later.

This is the part of a World Cup the romantics love most. Not the final — the middle Tuesday, the supposedly routine group game that never quite is. It is sport at its most honest about itself: meaningless by every external measure, and somehow able to hold a nation's whole evening. This desk takes that seriously on purpose, because if you want to know what people will do with their passion when work asks less of it, you could do worse than watch what they already do with a Tuesday night and a flag.

None of it solves anything. The government will still be mid-handover on Wednesday morning, the questions this paper exists to ask still unanswered. But for one evening a divided country gets to be a crowd again, united not by a manifesto but by a shirt — and there is something worth noticing in how badly we want that, and how reliably a game delivers it.

For your diary: England v Ghana, World Cup Group L, tomorrow — Tuesday 23 June. The match is an evening kick-off; check listings for the confirmed time and channel before you settle in.

Why it matters here: on the day Britain learned it would soon have a new Prime Minister, the thing most likely to bring the country into one room is a football match that decides nothing. That instinct — to pour real feeling into something that produces nothing — is the clearest preview we have of how people fill the hours once work stops filling them.