Such was my fear of the dreaded penalty shootouts, I fully considered spending Tuesday watching old videos of past England failures just to help prepare me for the worst.

I even imagined a nightmare scenario of Gareth Southgate nominating himself as a penalty taker, with Jordan Pickford choosing the famous Rene Higuita “scorpion kick” to keep the Colombians at bay.

But I should have had more faith in England’s spirit, courage and determination, not only in the shootout, but in the match overall against a team whose dubious antics made the Panamanians resemble the Nolan sisters.

After seeing one Colombian deliberately scuffing the penalty spot before Harry Kane’s second-half penalty, I fully expected another to claim at the end he’d swapped shirts with Harry Maguire and found the bracelet Bobby Moore was alleged to have nicked in Bogota.

I thought ITV’s Clive Tyldesley was in cracking form. With an acceptable degree of patriotic bias, he captured perfectly the emotional highs and lows of a truly dramatic night (not that any celebrating England fan heard a word he said after Eric Dier’s decisive kick such was the mass hysteria everywhere – he could have credited Theresa May with the England winner while reading out the nuclear launch codes and no-one would have noticed).

Indeed, in general, broadcasters covering the World Cup are warming to the task, even if, after Saudi Arabia’s game with Egypt, BBC’s Garry Richardson tells me he inadvertently informed Today programme listeners that “Saudi Arabia have beaten Ipswich 2-1” (“surely Garry,” I said, “you must have known the Saudis weren’t in Ipswich’s group?”).

Perhaps he’d been watching the old 80s film “Escape to Victory” in which Michael Caine and Pele assembled a team of Allied POWs to face their German captors – and included several Ipswich players as extras.

I read somewhere that on the last day of filming the cast adjourned to the pub to celebrate but the Germans went home after the first round. 

(editor’s note – you just have to gloat, don’t you?)

(Peter – Yep. And I pity the bloke in the Luzhniki stadium for the final who now has now to pick up the 30,000 beach towels the German fans left on the seats in April)

Some of the stand-out features from the World Cup may filter through to other tournaments and lower levels – although if the full VAR master plan catches on in the Sussex Sunday League, I fear they might be hard-pushed to lay on 11 match officials for every fixture.

When I graced division 13 back in the day, at least one linesman might easily have been a dog-walking passerby waving a pooper-scooper.

We don’t want our football dignitaries like Sir Bobby Charlton, David Beckham and Prince William following dippy Diego’s lead by responding to crowd jibes with two-handed middle finger gestures (one hand would be quite sufficient) and hopefully some of the players’ laughable histrionics on being tackled won’t become the norm – especially Neymar’s trick, presumably picked up while watching our National Lottery draw – of rolling over for a week.

As TV pundit Martin O’Neill put it, what price the Brazilian’s pain threshold if he has the flu jab?

And did the Icelandic coach set a dangerous precedent by saying his players were allowed to have sex before matches?

Quite apart from this potentially delaying the kick offs, surely most spectators prefer watching the anthems or a brass band anyway?