The dustbins! I went outside with the dustbin, and that was the moment I realised that my country had changed. For ever, as it turned out.

It was Sunday 1 July 1990, England’s quarter-final against Cameroon in Naples. I watched at home and at half-time remembered that Monday was dustbin day. I lugged mine on to my north London rat-run street. And there was silence.

Just about everyone was indoors watching the game. Obviously, the same will happen this Wednesday. But then it was far from obvious. It may be hard for those who believe sporting history began in 1992 (“In the beginning God created the Premier League ... and he saw that it was good because everyone would make oodles of dosh”) to imagine the state of English football in the 1980s.

There were the three great disasters: the Bradford fire, Heysel and Hillsborough. But in any case football was in disgrace due to hooliganism. Sensible people avoided the game. It was never quite challenged as the No 1 sport but its position was wobbly. Cricket was far more likely to create headlines that did not involve fatalities: the nation’s most charismatic and newsworthy sportsman of the 80s was Ian Botham. Sports such as American football and, in some cities, ice hockey, had started to generate remarkable interest.

Furthermore, sport as a whole was not the all-embracing preoccupation it was to become. It was impossible to imagine a major government crisis struggling for public attention because of a mere game. And never before had sport made London sit so still.

I was covering the 1990 World Cup for the Guardian, but not obsessively. I had always hated being abroad in summer, partly because of that now-forgotten tradition, “the cricket season”. And that summer I was wildly in love and about to get married. So it was agreed I could commute.

My itinerary began with England in Sardinia, where the aggro overwhelmed the indifferent football. I came back to give Frank Keating a break from Wimbledon, (where the main event was 14-year-old Jennifer Capriati) and was due back in Italy for the semi-finals. Hence the importance of the dustbins, made all the more urgent because England came from behind to win 3-2, whereupon the silence turned to celebration.

The manager, Bobby Robson, was under pressure even before the tournament and forced to announce that he would resign afterwards. All along, the football writers hurled abuse at him – sometimes with a viciousness now found only in presidential tweets – for his strategy, or lack of it. And their mood was not improved by the general quality of the entertainment.

The 3-2 scoreline was unique at that World Cup, which is still recognised as the most turgid of all time: defences ruled, and not prettily: throughout there was an average of just over two goals a game, despite several thrashings suffered by no-hopers early on.

Three days after that, I arrived in the media centre in Turin for the semi-final to find my colleagues sunk in gloom. They greeted a traveller from home like shipwrecked mariners. It had all been so boring, they moaned. I almost had to shake some of them: “Don’t you understand what’s going on in England? The country’s gone crazy.” They shook their heads in bewilderment. Modern telecoms were still in their infancy. At that very moment commuters were hurtling for home with all the zeal we can expect this Wednesday.

That night England lost to the Germans, heroically, via the new and still controversial expedient of penalties. Next morning Robson gave a press conference suffused with such mellowness, forgiveness and class that it paved the way for his ultimate knighthood and near-canonisation. A new life was about to begin, for him and for English football.

But this was not just the World Cup when England rediscovered football. It was when much of the planet found it for the first time. One technology was then approaching its peak: even since the 1986 World Cup TV had spread across the globe, into rural Africa, where squeals of delight were ubiquitous when the continent’s standard-bearers Cameroon took the lead, and Asia: there were riots in Calcutta after a power cut at a crucial moment.

There was also a riot in Northampton, after England lost, when 500 youths rampaged through the town centre. It had all been more vivid on TV than it was in Turin. The abiding image of the night, that of Gazza’s tears (not in defeat but when he was booked, thus forcing him to miss the notional final), was not visible in the stadium.

And thus the new order began. Then came the Premier League. This did nothing to end England’s failures in major international tournaments. If anything, it exacerbated them by reducing homegrown players to bit parts and making the best of them rich enough to be blasé about summertime distractions. It has taken this hitherto obscure group of youngsters to change that mindset.

There will be tears again if England lose on Wednesday. But they are more likely off the field than on, among the millions back home who, at the moment of the nation’s greatest existential crisis since 1940, really are daft enough to think football matters more.