There is a particular feeling that descends upon England every time a major football tournament reaches the knockout stages.

It isn’t confidence. England supporters have been around far too long for that.

It isn’t certainty either. We know better than to tempt fate.

It is something altogether stranger.

Hope.

Not the loud, chest-beating kind. The quiet sort. The little voice that whispers, “This could be the one.”

As I write this, England are due to face DR Congo in the next round of the World Cup. I’m no psychic. I don’t possess a crystal ball, I haven’t consulted the stars, and no raven has landed on my windowsill bearing prophetic insight. Yet, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, I have a feeling England will win.

If you’ve followed football for any length of time, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Supporters are wonderfully irrational creatures. We insist we aren’t superstitious while refusing to wash the lucky shirt that has seen us through the group stages. We sit in exactly the same chair because moving might somehow alter events unfolding thousands of miles away. We wear the same socks. Drink from the same mug. Walk the same route to the pub.

Heaven help anyone who dares to interrupt the ritual.

From the outside it all seems faintly ridiculous. From the inside it feels absolutely essential.

Anthropologists have long recognised that rituals emerge wherever people face uncertainty. Sailors developed elaborate customs before setting out to sea. Miners carried charms into the darkness below ground. Soldiers tucked keepsakes into their uniforms before battle. None of these acts altered reality, but they gave people something equally valuable: the feeling that they had done all they could.

Football supporters are no different. A World Cup match is completely beyond our control, yet millions of us participate in tiny acts of personal magic. We know they don’t influence the result. And yet…

Every tournament produces its own prophets.

Who could forget Paul the Octopus, whose remarkable run of successful predictions during the 2010 World Cup turned him into an unlikely global celebrity? Since then there have been psychic pigs, fortune-telling cats, parrots, llamas, elephants and countless other animals apparently gifted with supernatural sporting insight.

Newspapers gleefully report their predictions, and millions secretly hope one of them has genuinely glimpsed tomorrow.

Then there are the dreams.

Search online after any major international tournament and you’ll find people convinced they dreamt the winning goal days before kick-off. Others claim to have experienced déjà vu, inexplicable feelings of certainty or fleeting visions of celebrations that had yet to happen.

Psychologists, of course, offer rather more grounded explanations. We remember the hits and quietly forget the misses. We naturally seek patterns in random events. Given enough predictions, some will inevitably come true. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps not.

Folklore has always occupied that curious space between belief and scepticism. It isn’t always concerned with whether something is objectively true. More often it asks why people continue to believe. Why certain traditions endure. Why stories survive generation after generation.

Football has quietly developed a folklore of its own. Lucky mascots. Sacred stadiums. Legendary managers. Songs that seem almost liturgical. Tales of impossible comebacks passed from parent to child like family legends. Entire generations can recall exactly where they were for moments of sporting triumph or heartbreak. Those memories become stories. Those stories become tradition.

Maybe that is why every tournament feels different. Hope itself becomes a ritual.

So here I am, making my own prediction. Not because I’ve consulted ancient manuscripts. Not because Mercury is in retrograde. Not because a spectral striker appeared at the foot of my bed with tomorrow’s scoreline. Simply because, like millions of England supporters before me, I have that peculiar feeling that arrives every tournament and somehow survives every disappointment.

England 2.DR Congo 0.

Kane to score.

Will I be right?

We’ll know soon enough.

If I am wrong, this article will quietly join the long history of optimistic football predictions that never quite came to pass.

If I am right?

Well… I’m still not going to claim I’mpsychic.

But don’t be surprised if you see me down the bookies 😁

Feel free to post your own prediction in the comments 😉