In his biography, Roy Keane shared a now-infamous story of a Sir Alex Ferguson team talk. With the Manchester United locker room stressed after a tough stretch of games, they next faced Tottenham Hotspur. 

Knowing how highly strung his men were, instead of giving a grand speech to stir their hearts, he simply came in and said, "lads, it's Tottenham." 

After seeing how much fun England seemed to have in their second group game, it's impossible to imagine manager Gareth Southgate having anything to say other than "Lads, it's Panama."

England were in control from the opening whistle in Nizhny Novgorod and John Stones goal off a corner eight minutes into the game felt like an inevitability even at such an early stage. 

Besides for Edgar Barcenas, who almost seemed like a professional footballer, the rest of the Panama team seemed utterly clueless how to respond and did nothing besides for try and draw fouls, a tactic which backfired just over 10 minutes later as England earned a penalty when Jesse Lingard was barreled over by the man with the most Central American name of all time, Fidel Escobar.

Harry Kane slotted it in with ease and still when the game restarted, Panama had no real response. 

England's free-flowing tactics didn't even seem like too much for them, it looked more like they were hoping for a 0-0 draw and with that long gone, genuinely couldn't formulate anything else. It had started to feel like a friendly, but by the time Lingard scored a worldie from outside of the box – a gorgeously curled in shot with his left – and John Stone's scored his second five minutes later with a rebounded header from a complex free kick, it looked as if England were on their training ground.

Harry Kane's second penalty on the stroke of half-time was, again, slotted in with ease and his muted pumped fist celebration matched the tenor of the match. This wasn't a win, nor was it a rout: It was a complete embarrassment. 

There's nothing wrong with adding a little blood and guts to the beautiful game but Panama had gone from playing rough to looking for a fight. A brawl almost kicked off before the Harry Kane penalty was even taken and, soon after, Lingard got visibly smacked on the back of the head Michael Murillo in the 25th minute for no reason at all. 

It started to feel like there was a Panama foul in every play, an idea backed up by FIFA's slow-motion replays in which there was always someone from the England team being attacked in the background. The say living well is the best revenge and the scoreline proved it.

England lost their energy in the second half. When you're 5-0 up against a team that barely seems able to kick the ball in a straight line, it's difficult to get fired up, yet even with this new slower tempo, the Three Lions were literally and figuratively running rings around Panama. 

Their sixth goal was a genuine accident: Ruben Loftus-Cheek tried a long-range shot which clipped the back of Kane's ankle and sailed in a parabola into the back of the net; goalkeeper Jaime Penedo, flummoxed, collapsed to the ground and watched it go in.

If Gareth Southgate could have got the game stopped there, or convinced his opposite Hernan Gomez, to throw in the towel, he would. 

Panama's thuggery made a 6-0 rout into a dangerous game; having scored England's first hat-trick since Gary Lineker's against Poland at Mexico '96, Harry Kane had been England's most lethal player, and he was immediately subbed off alongside England's best player, Lingard, for their own protection. 

Jaime Vardy and Fabian Delph came on as their respective replacements, no doubt aware that they were going to spend the next half an hour defending themselves from grapples, rabbit punches and foot stomps first and actually playing football as a distant second.

As with Germany's 7-1 murder of the Brazilian side four years ago, Panama brought one back so deep into the game that garbage time had already finished. 

With fifteen minutes remaining, a big, looping Panamanian free kick was defended in name only and 37-year-old super sub Felipe Baloy got on the end of it, booting it past Jordan Pickford, scoring his country's first ever World Cup goal. Couldn't have happened to nicer lads.

Expectations have to be tempered. This is England's biggest World Cup victory by a considerable margin, but it is also only Panama, a country known for being a series of banks with a canal running through it that isn't known for being a hotbed of CONCACAF football; but wasn't it just Iceland, who beat England 2-1 in Euro 2016? And wasn't it just Costa Rica who held England to a 0-0 in World Cup 2014? And England's group at World Cup 2012, infamously dubbed EASY (England, Algeria, Slovenia, Yanks) and the best English group since The Beatles, included a 1-1 and 0-0 draw against the United States and Algeria.

Yes, it might have been "just" Panama, but the fact it wasn't "just" another England performance is incredibly positive for their team. With qualification already confirmed, England can face the big boys of Belgium – a match expected to be their first real test - without the distractions of points or goal difference getting in the way. It'll be tough, but for the first time, it seems possible – for this England side, anything seems possible.