At nine o'clock tonight, the country does the same thing at the same time

At 9pm tonight, on BBC One, England play Ghana in Boston. Kick-off is 21:00 UK time — and it is worth being precise about that, because a 4pm start in Massachusetts becomes a 9pm start here, which is the difference between catching it and missing it. The BBC's build-up starts at eight.

It is England's second game of the 2026 World Cup. They beat Croatia 4-2 in their opener — Harry Kane with two, Jude Bellingham and Marcus Rashford with one each — and a win tonight all but sends Thomas Tuchel's side into the knockout rounds. Ghana arrive level on points, having laboured past Panama and won it in stoppage time through the 20-year-old Caleb Yirenkyi. On paper England are favourites. On paper means nothing, which is the entire appeal.

Let me tell you what is actually happening tonight, beyond the football.

For about two hours, several million people in this country will choose to do the same thing at the same time. They will not be told to. There is no productive reason for it. Nobody's mortgage gets smaller because Kane — who needs one more World Cup goal to pass Gary Lineker as England's all-time leading scorer in the competition — puts one in the corner. And yet living rooms, beer gardens still warm from a 35-degree day, and group chats that have lain quiet since Sunday will all light up on the same cue.

This is the thing sport does that almost nothing else does any more: it synchronises us. We have spent two decades being gently un-synchronised — television on demand, music in private playlists, work scattered across hours and rooms. A World Cup night reverses it for ninety minutes. The same gasp goes up two streets away at the same instant. You can hear it through an open window. In a heatwave, every window is open.

It matters this week in particular. The country is, technically, between leaders — Sir Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday, with a Labour contest now set to run into the summer and no successor yet installed. That is the kind of week that makes a nation feel slightly unmoored. And into it walks the oldest, simplest civic ritual we have left: turn on the same channel, want the same outcome, for no reason except that we have agreed to.

This is precisely the question the paper exists to ask, arriving in its most enjoyable form. When the work is done — or when, as this week, the people in charge of the work have stepped back — what do we actually do with ourselves? We gather around something that does not pay, does not last, and does not matter, and we treat it, for one evening, as though it matters enormously. That is not a waste of an evening. That might be the point of having evenings.

So: BBC One, 9pm. Whatever else is unresolved this week — the leadership, the weather, the rest of it — for two hours tonight the country has somewhere to put its attention, together. Win or lose, that is worth showing up for.

Bring water. It is going to be a warm one in front of the telly.