Every two years, it's the same.
An men's international football tournament kicks off.
If a Celtic nation qualifies, they hope to make it beyond the first stage of the tournament and everything from there is a bonus.
If England qualifies, well... England expects.
Nothing but the last four will do and if England doesn't make it, the manager and the squad gets slaughtered by football pundits, tabloid writers and by some supporters on radio phone-ins and social media.
When the World Cup kicks off in Mexico City this Thursday, expect pundits like Gary Neville, Ian Wright, Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton to wax lyrical about the attacking threat of the England team but also fret about whether their defence is strong enough.
Expect Scotland fans and their pundits to simply hope their national squad can somehow manage make it through the initial group phase.
The pressure on Thomas Tuchel's England team will be immense and if they put in some mediocre performances along the way, expect some pundits and some fans to get pretty nasty.
The pressure faced each tournament by the England squad is the subject of James Graham's Olivier Award winning play 'Dear England' which premierecd at the National Theatre in 2023.
Graham's play focuses on Gareth Southgate's remarkable tenure as England manager - the most successful of anyone in the hot seat since Sir Alf Ramsey won the World Cup in 1966.
Under Southgate, England made two European Championship finals, a World Cup semi final and a quarter final.
He created a team spirit designed to overcome the weight of expectation and negativity around England teams.
But in doing that, he faced brickbats as well as bouquets.
Graham's play has made it to the screen on BBC1 with a four episode run that extends the original play to beyond the Qatar World Cup and into Southgate's final tournament, the 2024 European Championships in Germany.
Haunted by the experience of missing a penalty in the semi-final shootout against Germany at the 1996 European Championship finals in Wembley, we see Joseph Fiennes' Southgate take up the reins in the England senior mens team when Andrew Dunn's Sam Allardyce is forced to quit after just one game because of a corruption scandal.
Initially appointed on a temporary basis, Southgate is a man on a mission to break the negative mindset around a team that always faces huge expectations.
Around him, he assembles a coaching staff that includes Daniel Ryan's Steve Holland, Sam Spruell's Mike Webster and Gerard Monaco's physio who we just know as Phil.
Crucially, Southgate also recruits Jodie Whitaker's psychologist Pippa Grange to change the mentality of his players - especially when it comes to dealing with setbacks and facing England's demons regarding penalties.
Setting the Qatar World Cup as the competition England is aiming to win, Southgate and his coaching staff exceeds the Football Association, media and supporters' expectations by reaching the semi finals of the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
With Will Attenbring's striker Harry Kane leading the squad, Southgate and Grange create a tight bond between the players who include Adam Hugill's Harry Maguire, Josh Barrow's Jordan Pickford and Francis Lovehall's Raheem Sterling.
With the European Championship delayed by a year due to the COVID pandemic, Southgate steers the team in 2021 to their first final since 1966 with a showdown against Italy at Wembley - only to lose on penalties.
Focusing on the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the team goes to the competition as one of the favourites but they end up getting knocked out in the quarter finals by France.
The last hurrah for Southgate comes in the 2024 European Championships in Germany where, remarkably, despite a run of poor performances, England somehow manages to scrape through the group phase and the knockout rounds into another final - this time against Spain.
'Dear England' takes its name from the open letter Southgate penned to England fans during the COVID pandemic.
In many respects, it's not simply a drama about football.
It's about the qualities required to lead a team whether it's on a sports field, a company, a school, a trade union or a government.
It's also about building a culture that's about overcoming a crippling fear of failure and is also based on hard graft and dedicated public service.
It's about principles too, with Southgate and his captain Harry Kane standing up against the invective thrown at Etem-Ita Duke's Marcus Rashford, Abdul Sessay's Bukayo Saka and Riess Fennell's Jason Sancho on social media by a minority of racist England fans for missing penalties in the 2021 European Championship final.
With Southgate and his team facing criticism in some quarters for taking the knee at the start of matches in solidarity with anti racism campaigners, we see them also encounter obstacles from FIFA over the potential wearing of an armband by Harry Kane in the Qatar World Cup in a protest over the host nation's treatment of the LGBTQ+ community.
The principled leadership shown by Southgate and Kane stands in contrast to the political dysfunction in post Brexit Westminster and around the world - with Graham and his directors Paul Whittington and Rupert Goold weaving in archive footage of Conservative Prime Ministers, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, images of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the corruption scandal that engulfed FIFA.
Adapting his play for the screen, Graham and his directors sometimes give 'Dear England' the swagger of a heist movie, with players being freeze framed and introduced with captions when they join the squad.
There are elements of the horror genre in there too, with recurring images of Kasper Hilton-Hille's younger version of Southgate walking up to the penalty spot in the 1996 semi final and missing.
Whittington and Goold also depict low points like the racist abuse directed at the team in Hungary in a grotesque horror show style.
In the round, they pull together a four part TV drama that is definitely worth watching - especially as an appetiser to this year's World Cup, even if the tone is sometimes a bit all over the place.
Recreating his acclaimed performance on the stage as Southgate, Fiennes is very good indeed - brilliantly capturing the mannerisms and vocal inflections of the manager but, more importantly, taking the performance beyond mere impersonation and capturing his character's decency, drive and occasional self-doubt.
Whitaker is good foil too as Grange and Kelly, Spruell and Attenbring also make a strong impression.
Sometimes, though, the Roy of the Rovers chronicling of England's escapades on the pitch jars with the more weighty themes that Graham's drama tackles off it.
The show's Guy Ritchie like heist movie freeze frames of players who fall in and out of Southgate's set up can get a bit tiresome and also the recurring nightmarish recreations of Southgate's 1996 penalty miss.
A scene where Steven Mackintosh's former Prime Minister John Major tries to console the young Southgate after his penalty miss, while based on fact, seems a little over written.
If Mackintosh's cameo is a little too on the nose, so is Bobby Schofield's Jiminy Cricket moment early on in Southgate's reign as the England, Everton and Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney where he tells the manager about the mental toll national expectation has put on the squad.
There is, of course, a disclaimer at the start of each episode that Graham has based his drama on research but some characters are fictionalised and some dialogue is imagined.
To be fair, Graham mostly makes a very good fist of it.
Indeed, a bit like Southgate's achievements as England manager, he comes damn close to pulling off perfection.
But if there is one over riding emotion you feel watching 'Dear England,' it's one of genuine fear for Tuchel and his squad in the United States, Mexico and Canada if they make a mess of this World Cup.
A nation still expects, even under a new England regime.
('Dear England' was broadcast on BBC1 between May 24-June 1, 2026 with all episodes available on the iPlayer)
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