England have found one effective, clever way to score — will that be enough against Sweden?

We need to talk about England’s chances. No, hang on. That makes it sound like we’re talking about the odds. We’re not. Let’s start again.

We need to talk about the chances England make, for Gareth Southgate’s quarter-finalists are a curious team. They are simultaneously very good at making the best possible kind of scoring chance, but kind of bad at creating most of the others.

The best possible kind of scoring chance is the penalty, and it’s pleasingly odd that of all the countries competing at the World Cup, it’s England, the one with the biggest hang-up over penalty shootouts, that are the best at winning them in normal time. They’ve been awarded three, more than any other team, and had VAR broken their way against Tunisia that might have been more.

Perhaps significantly, they’ve all been the same kind of penalty as well. However you feel about the rest of their endeavours, this England team look an absolute nightmare to defend in the box. All the big lads, plus Harry Kane, all jostling around in a clump, before suddenly breaking and charging around: bundling into defenders, putting big heads on it, falling to the ground and shrieking.

One English commentator has even started referring to England’s cluster of set-piece attackers as “the love train,” which is why we are calling for Glenn Hoddle’s immediate arrest. (If Jon Champion and Ally McCoist don’t get the final, we riot. Or we watch the BBC.)

Kane’s penalty against Colombia in particular was an excellent illustration of just what defenders are up against. It probably is a foul, and so a penalty, but it’s exacerbated (and maybe even engineered) by the striker. Contact, and then: Oh no! Don’t foul me! Stop fouling me! Oh no! Oh referee, did you see that?! He fouled me!

And then: Thanks ref!

There’s a fundamental imbalance of risk and reward at the heart of penalty-box wrestling. After all, it costs an attacker very little to get involved, and the potential upside is huge. If the defender gets out of the way, excellent: free header. If the defender joins in, excellent: the penalty is in play. The worst that can happen is the referee gives a free-kick to the defending side; the best is a penalty. One of those things can be shrugged off, while the other changes games.

This used to be balanced by the fact that referees basically just ignored it. But perhaps now, here in the early days of VAR’s panopticon, the manufacturing of contact in the box will become one of the most important methods of chance creation. If so, then on the evidence of this World Cup England are, for once, at the cutting edge of football thinking ... at least, with a little help from their opponents. Three of the four teams England have played so far have been happy to have a grapple in the box, and Harry Kane’s figures speak for how well that’s gone.

But it’s just as well that England have cracked this, since they haven’t — with the exception of that opening flurry against Tunisia — been creating an unanswerable weight of chances from other routes. The “let’s try and get somebody sent off” part of Colombia’s plan didn’t really work, and ended up looking kind of silly, but the “let’s enclog midfield and gum everything up part” went pretty well.

Broadly speaking, Southgate’s England are a diligent but conservative side. They value possession, and they don’t take many risks with their passing. The attacking trio of Dele Alli, Jesse Lingard, and Raheem Sterling have impressed more with their bustle than their creativity so far, and it’s perhaps relevant that Sterling plays his club football with David Silva and Kevin de Bruyne, Alli with Christian Eriksen, and Lingard for a club that are really frustrating to watch. At some point, they’ll run into a side that don’t obligingly break themselves down inside the penalty area.

Will that be Sweden, their quarter-final opponents? It is correct to view this as the easier side of the draw, but it is not correct to view this as easy. Indeed, look a bit further back, and Zlatan Ibrahimovic isn’t the only giant this Swedish side have waved off. They finished second in their qualifying group ahead of the Netherlands, then they beat Italy in the playoffs. They topped Group F ahead of both Mexico and Germany — late defeat acknowledged — and then they eased past a Switzerland side that had caused problems for both Brazil and Serbia.

With the exception of two minutes against Germany, when they first botched a chance to win the game, then conceded a silly free-kick to lose it, Sweden have looked smooth, well-organised, and generally in control of what they want to do. Further, while more than half of the teams at this World Cup have given away at least one penalty, Sweden aren’t among them. If football is coming home, it might have to take the long way round. Time to find out if it knows the way.