This England team have changed the conversation – but can we change ourselves? | David Goldblatt

For a month we have felt what collective action can make possible, what it really feels like to be we' not me'

England, we need to talk about football. I know we've been talking about it, almost every minute of every day for the past exhilarating month. But the truth is that we need football to talk about England.

The fact is, nothing else in this country allows us to talk about ourselves like the England national football team and our collective experience of its struggles. Our years of hurt" - 55 and counting - are not wounds of battle but pains of birth. For all these years, this stateless nation, England, has been hidden inside the broken carapace of imperial Britain.