England's Dreaming...

I was polite enough to send all my English friends a 'good luck' text immediately prior to the Bloemfontein bloodbath, and a few of them have commented on how much they appreciated the gesture. It goes without saying that all parties knew the 'good luck' was entirely rhetorical, a Corinthian expression of brotherly goodwill rather than a serious declaration that I wanted them to win. And I must say I found it by far the most enjoyable match of the World Cup thus far, an utterly joyous occasion.

No matter how much you think you've grown up, the old feelings still resurface every time dear old Blighty engages in serious international combat. It's instinctive, something that operates independently of my conscious will or reason, something I now realise I'll never have any control over. Germany's opening goal had me leaping so high I almost loafed the ceiling. It was a work of wondrous simplicity, a throwback to the glory days when Packie Bonner had a strong claim to be the pre-eminent creative playmaker in world football. A great big savage hoof from the keeper deep into enemy territory, a charitable bounce, a rabbit-caught-in-headlights reaction from the terminally hopeless Matthew Upson, and a timely pounce from the predatory Klose. Gotcha! (There will always be plenty of room in football for the Route One approach: not as a default setting, but as an occasional surprise tactic. I seem to recall Inter Milan breaking the deadlock in this year's Champions League Final by doing something similar. And given the GAA background of approximately half our players, Ireland are arguably better qualified to deploy it than any other nation on Earth. But I digress).
At 2-0, we were entering wonderland. And then, suddenly if briefly, England woke up. It was frenetic, hypnotic stuff. Lampard's disallowed equaliser was obviously an outrage. At the same time, I confess that I can't remember the last time I laughed so much, with the spectre of Sir Geoff Hurst's blatantly illegitimate 1966 goal bringing to mind the time-honoured cliché that 'these things tend to even themselves out in the long term' even if it takes 44 years to do so.
There was also the disturbing prospect that the miscarriage of justice might prove to exert a decisive impact on the final result, and we'd never, ever, ever hear the end of it. (To those who would point out that I still haven't shut up about the Thierry Henry incident, I say: this is different. That was Ireland; this, to quote the great Shane Meadows, is England).
To say that Germany found their groove in the second half would be a colossal understatement: they were fucking sublime. Ozil and Muller are both still only 21; if they're this good now, what are they going to be capable of in five years' time? It has to be said that they were given a huge helping hand by the Three Lions' sub-Sunday League defending; and the worst offender by far was the egomaniacal John Terry, who repeatedly left his comrades knee-deep in the shit, brainlessly charging upfield, obviously possessed by the delusion that he was going to rescue his nation's destiny with a few bullet headers, and that it was up to Barry, Upson etc to keep an eye on the back door. The consequences were cataclysmic, and I think it's fair to say that even the most one-eyed English fan would concede that they were considerably flattered by the eventual 4-1 scoreline.
The fallout has been predictable enough: much gnashing of teeth and dark mutterings about the unseemly size of the offenders' pay packets, and calls for the public beheading of Fabio Capello, whom eagle-eyed HP readers may have noticed bears a startling physical resemblance to Hot Press's Dear Leader and Life-President Niall Stokes (Except that the aforementioned Stokes is far handsomer and more attractive to members of the opposite sex – Ed), with the loftier newspapers urging a root-and-branch reform of coaching methods, youth structures etc, and suggesting that the overwhelmingly non-English make-up of the domestic league's top flight is detrimental to the national team's long-term progress.
The truth is: there's absolutely nothing new about the situation in which they find themselves. It is now surely beyond dispute that the much-maligned Sven-Goran Eriksson actually did a reasonably good job in steering HMS Brittania to respectably narrow honourable exits at the quarter-final stage of three major tournaments, a feat which compares very favourably to anything achieved by his successors (McClaren and Capello) or predecessors (Taylor, Hoddle, Keegan).
The host-nation blips of 1966 and 1996 notwithstanding, the overwhelming evidence of half a century's football is that England are a top-16 nation in global terms: no more, no less. England spent the guts of the '70s failing to reach World Cups: they didn't make it to Euro '84, USA '94 or Euro '08, and probably wished they hadn't reached Euro '88, Euro '92 or Euro 2000. By far the best England team in (semi-)recent memory was the class of 1990, and that happened after their clubs had spent five years in exile from European competition.
There is no quick fix, no magic solution. There is a general culture of carelessness in possession at all levels of football which they might do well to address, but the perception that they're suddenly 'in decline' doesn't tally with the evidence.
At least they were spared a quarter-final meeting with Argentina, which in all likelihood would not have been an enjoyable experience. Mad Diego has apparently taken to waking up his squad in the mornings by going room-to-room and blowing vuvuzelas in their ears. And yet, for all the fears that he would somehow manage to sabotage his phenomenally talented team by taking off his entire defence and replacing them with strikers on a whim, or naming himself at centre-forward, or running onto the pitch to fire an air-rifle at the first referee to incur his wrath, or embarking on the mother of all cocaine binges at half-time in much the same way that Jose Mourinho opts for a double espresso, he has yet to put a foot wrong. He has named by-and-large the right starting line-up in every game, made the right substitutions at the right times, and shows every sign of being not just a competent manager, but dare one say it, an inspired one. The players clearly love him; and the appreciation is evidently mutual. They brushed aside their first serious challenge (the bewitching Mexicans) with fly-swat ease, and I think they'll have enough in the tank to see off Germany, after which Spain most likely lie in wait in the semis, although it wouldn't be a huge shock to see the Portuguese outwit their neighbours.
At this point in time (70 minutes gone in the Holland-Slovakia game) I'm still sticking with my initial prediction of a Brazil-Spain final. I actually gave very serious consideration to lashing a sneaky fiver on the Japanese to win the bloody thing at 250/1 before the whole shebang got underway, but chickened out after a forensic inspection of their friendly results dissuaded me. I may yet live to regret that one. They couldn't do it, surely. Or could they?