England want to change at last. The huge weight of English footballing culture makes it difficult for their style to change overnight and acquire a levity that would allow it to take flight – as if somewhere in the footballing instinct of these players with a fresh talent and an indisputable commitment to a new idea there is still something rigid that refuses to die. In order for this new style, played along the floor, to grow and spread like ivy, covering everything and taking root, collective intelligence is necessary.

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An intelligence that, for example, ensures the best player in the team – in England’s case, Harry Kane – is involved as often as his quality demands. If the best player does not come into contact with the game sufficiently for the opposition to feel intimidated and his own team to grow, there is something wrong either with the player (I don’t think so) or with the team.

It seems to me England are attempting to make that happen the right way, that they are heading in the right direction. To judge by the results, they are succeeding, although Gareth Southgate has said this is a process that is still not complete and I would agree. I understand there is always a risk implicit in contradicting results – which are God these days – but I feel like that attempt still feels a little forced; it doesn’t feel entirely natural.

What do I mean by natural? It’s hard to explain but easy to see: look at Luka Modric, the greatest threat to England, and you will understand. He’s prodigious playing this game – and, so they tell me, every other game too – as if he was born with some muscular intelligence applicable to any activity expressed through a ball. Modric honours that natural advantage by playing with passion, enjoying what he does. He kills himself out there and yet for a superior talent like him, that does not count as sacrifice or suffering. Maybe we can call it a challenge, a test, a very particular type of fun.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Luka Modric skips away from Russia’s Artem Dzyuba. Photograph: Sergei Fadeichev/Tass

We’re not talking about a gift like Diego Maradona’s, rather one that consists filling the game with common sense. He doesn’t do impossible things; when he plays a pass, you see it and think: ‘That’s what I would have done.’ We love to draw conclusions like that when we watch games but we should not believe what we say. In fact, what Modric does only Modric does.

When the ball passes by his feet, the play flows as if football was the easiest thing in the world. It’s not about adding intensity or danger to the move; it’s about adding sense, clarity, intent. At a World Cup at which it seems like spaces are disappearing – which is strange, considering the pitch still measures 100 x 70 – and everyone who gets the ball seems to be in a hurry, as if the entire pitch was penalty area, Modric performs the miracle of allowing the move to breathe, giving the ball the necessary speed, wherever it is on the field. Suddenly, we discover space and time do exist and that all that was needed was someone with the talent to bring them back, to make them what they always were. Someone who knows how to play football. Or better still, PLAY FOOTBALL in capital letters.

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The other characteristic the Croat has that doesn’t just convince me but fills me with emotion is his commitment to the game when his team have the ball and also when they lose it – from the first minute to the last. Against Russia, he won possession 15 times. In Sochi he struggled to find the game’s pulse, its rhythm, but as it went on, he came to understand what the game needed to the point at which he took control, running it.

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At the end of extra time, frustrated in his last attempt to attack Russia’s castle, fortified and so well defended, he fell to his knees exhausted. I could have cast a mould of him right there, producing a statue in honour of an exemplary, model footballer to be erected at every pitch everywhere in the world with a simple quote: “This is how you play football, this is how you feel football.”

And to complete the admiration, we should talk, too, of a kind of competitive maturity I wouldn’t say has been lost exactly but I do think has been forgotten amid the importance we seem to place on players who over-act. Modric is everywhere, he wants every ball, he runs as much as a responsible understanding of the game allows, but he never allows himself a single act of demagoguery. As if he believed the 80,000 spectators in the ground were intelligent enough to appreciate dignity. Or, better still, as if they didn’t exist. He does not feel the pull of populism, nor any temptation to play to the gallery. He is too focused on football, submitting his five senses to the game itself.

As intelligence – both muscular intelligence and intelligence as we have always understood it – is not so visible to the average fan, and as discretion has little market value, Modric will not win the Ballon d’Or, just as Andrés Iniesta did not win it in the generation before him. But that’s not his responsibility; that’s the responsibility of all of us who have turned football into a world where appearance is more powerful than substance.