It’s time to tell Shakespeare and Churchill to warm up

I’ve just walked past one of those cars with a Cross of St. George flag sticking out the window. Sometime between the end of England’s abysmal performance against Algeria last night and this afternoon, some despairing Englishman has used a marker pen to add the phrase “England Are Shit” to this emblem of national pride.

Given what we witnessed last night, I doubt if even a saint would disagree. 

At half-time during the US match, Adrian Chiles described the team’s performance as providing the usual mixture of hope and horror. Last night, only horror was on display. At one stage, late in the second half, I counted seven consecutive England passes that went straight to an opposition player. (There may very well have been more, but, fearing for my blood pressure, I stopped counting at that point.) This from players who’ve won the Champions League, the FA Cup and the Premiership - some, all three! 

When the World Cup started, I put England’s chances of reaching the final at about 50 to 1, given that Wayne Rooney can’t score goals for England, while the no doubt well-meaning but unbelievably clumsy Emile Heskey can’t score goals at all. After the US match, that stretched to 100 to 1. After last night, the odds are nearer 1000 to 1. It now seems unlikely they’ll even manage to claw their way out of the sheer-walled pit they’ve so assiduously dug for themselves during three hours of almost inconceivable sporting ineptness. 

Following England’s draw with the United States, my brother promptly predicted England would draw their next two games and thereby fail to reach the play-off stages, whereupon we could all relax and start to enjoy the football. I have a feeling he’ll be proved right next Wednesday.

The reason for our pessimism – shared, I presume, by millions of other occasional footie-watchers here in Blighty – is simple: the team isn’t much cop. They qualified in style, true, but recently all the signs have suggested they would rapidly grind to a shambolic, constipated, fear-filled halt when the actual competition started. 

So it has proved. 

Rooney is having a rotten World Cup for the second time in a row. Last night, he was messy, not Messi (I should have worked for The Sun, I really should). Gerrard has glimmered very fitfully for his country over the years, and is evidently precisely the wrong personality to captain the side. Unappealing wide-boy thug, John Terry, is another serial failure internationally, and Lampard should be handed a permanent ASBO for another truly dire performance. Barry, Wright-Phillips, Crouch” Yer ‘avin’ a larff, incha? They’re  okay Premiership players – just. Half the team are running around, jerking and slipping and twitching as if they’d got Tourette’s, while the other half – rooted to the spot, dazed, confused – appear to have been dosed with Ketamine. All these young multi-millionaire Masters of the Universe have proved themselves to be just as successful as their Banking equivalents when it comes to amassing personal fortunes, but just as useless when it comes to serving this country’s interests. 

No doubt the knives will already be out for Capello – even if England manage to claw their way out of their group, his team have given us a horrible scare. He has undoubtedly made many errors; one suspects that playing a formation alien to most of the players and playing “stars” out of their normal club positions might not be that brilliant a strategy. This might work with brighter players, but these chaps give every indication, to quote Lyndon Johnson on Gerald Ford, of not being able to fart and chew gum at the same time. You don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to be a great player (mind you, he couldn’t have played any w… but, no, let’s not go there), but this bunch look like they couldn’t sign their own names without the help of experts.

But, ultimately, Capello can’t be held responsible for the paucity of top-flight talent caused by the invasion of the Premiership by foreign players, or the inability of England’s handful of world class footballers to screw their courage to the sticking place when needed. When Capello left the pitch at the end of last night’s match after ninety minutes of evident rage (I honestly began to worry whether his 64-year old heart would withstand so much explosive anger) he had acquired the bewildered thousand-yard stare that eventually becomes habitual to all England supporters.   

Before we consider the future of the national team, I think we should all apologise to Sven Goran Erikkson, whom we were so eager to jettison after his failure to get us past the World Cup quarter-finals on two occasions. That’s now beginning to look suspiciously like a managerial feat equivalent to climbing Everest and K2 dressed in trainers and a T-shirt with Eric Pickles strapped to your back.

God knows what’s to done between now and Wednesday. I’ll leave that to football experts (or the England coaching squad). Given there’s no known method of increasing players’ IQ in four days (or four decades, given this lot), and as performance-enhancing drugs are generally frowned on, I’d suggest sitting them down before the game and playing them an assortment of the most rousing battle speeches in the English language. 

Seriously! 

I’d start with Winston Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech, then move onto “This was their finest hour”:

        “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle

        depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our

       own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and   

       our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon

       be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this 

       island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may 

       be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad,

      sunlit uplands.

      But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States,

      including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the

      abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more

      protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore

      brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the

      British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, 

      men will still say, This was their finest hour.”

And then, just before they run onto the field of play, I’d blast them withLaurence Olivier as Henry V: 

     We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; 

     For he to-day that sheds his blood with me 

     Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, 

     This day shall gentle his condition; 

     And gentlemen in England now-a-bed 

     Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, 

     And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks 

     That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

And if none of those work, he should follow up with “Once more unto the breach” at half time.

And he should order all of them – without exception – to sing the National Anthem with gusto and belief.

Slovenia won’t  know what’s hit them!

Failure to follow my advice will result in yet more humiliation.  Consider yourself warned, Fabio.