A little cold can be a very useful thing, or at least it can according to Ernst Gombrich, author of the brilliant, oddly mournful children’s book A Little History of the World, written in six weeks in 1930s Vienna so he could read bits out to his wife while they were walking in the woods. In Gombrich’s analysis humans only became civilised – talking, living together, worrying about the guttering – because of the galvanising woes of the ice age. Cold was the glue, forcing these antisocial primates to huddle together, share their turnips, communicate, invent carpet slippers and generally hide from that grating wind outside.

If this is the case we should probably all give thanks for the civilising effects of February, the most brutal month of them all, which is even now still crunching down through the gears. Tuesday night was the coldest of the winter so far, preliminary to what the stats say is more often than not the chilliest week of the year. And really whatever the temperature February just feels a little more deathly, the trees emaciated, the birds glum, every surface bruised. At the same time anything that’s not February, any pocket of warmth and light in the middle of all this, feels doubly miraculous. All of which perhaps helps to explain why, despite the more obvious distractions elsewhere, February remains one of the great British football months.

There is of course no cold quite like the football cold, an irresistible force that enters through the extremities and settles in the bones, and that tends to be discussed in tones of hushed reverence, a heroic cold, a cold for the ages. Boundary Park – nicknamed Ice Station Zebra by Joe Royle – has long carried the torch as England’s coldest ground, tribute to a horribly porous design and an ideal location on top of a north-facing hill. I can remember eating a half-time pie there on a freezing December night and drawing a small crowd fascinated, in a scene reminiscent of the swirling spirits at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, by the huge, supernatural jet of steam spurting out of a hole in the pie’s crust as it made contact with the night air, in the process applying a kind of freeze-dried balti glaze to my exposed features that has, to this day, never quite disappeared.

There are plenty of other freezing English grounds, not to mention a range of textural variations. Craven Cottage is famously dank, the night air barrelling straight in off the Thames like a frozen bog mist. Likewise the Valley, where legend has it that the Charlton goalkeeper Sam Bartram once “played on” through an entire half-time break without realising his team-mates had gone back to the dressing room, so thick was the low-lying river fog.

Beyond this, cold has always been a huge part of football in a country where winter is still seen as the game’s pure founding state, and summer heat as an affliction to be borne manfully. We play a cold game stiffened with cold virtues, where heart, guts, legs – indeed, any bodily part other than the brain – are the key attributes. The England team, so the theory goes, play better when it’s cold. Spain have been beaten three times in the past 35 years, Brazil once in 10 games, Portugal twice since 1966. But in each case only in the months from November to April, before summer qualities such as patience and precision begin to overtake the high-tempo virtues of the cold footballer.

Plus the English club game has produced some genuinely great cold players. In Hunter Davies’ book The Glory Game there is a description of Graeme Souness spitting blood in the dressing room at Bristol City as a result (so Souness believes) of sitting for an hour and half in numbing cold before jumping up and running around with murderous intent. The Scot always did seem to be at his best when grimacing with shin-barking agony on some frosty cart track of a pitch, eyes narrowed, moustache writhing, the emperor of tiny-shorted midwinter pain-football.

Yet for all that, the idea of a defining winter-football gene has aways seemed a little bogus. England’s ability to win in February but not in June is surely more to do with the distinction between friendly and competitive internationals. Italy is as cold as England in winter. Sweden and Norway only followed the direct football model because our coaches – and indeed our current national team manager – showed them how it’s done. More recently, anyone who has followed the effects of FA regulations enforcing smaller goals and smaller pitches at junior levels, the skill levels in evidence on a small-sized winter mud‑bath, will know the cold style is not innate or conditioned by the weather, but a function of bad coaching and bad methods. Cold simply frames the experience.

Football may have become a complex, distant business at times, every surface transformed and made over, but the cold still remains – as does a stadium culture of glorious outdoor collectivism forged, like ice age cave dwellers, in those disappearing, wind-blown, industrial relics. Currently even Ice Station Zebra itself is in the process of being insulated, enclosed by a new north stand at its chilliest edge. We can only hope its cold will remain in outline, a muscle memory of something raw and bracingly vital.