Toward the end of their uninspiring 2006 World Cup qualifying campaign, England contrived to lose 1–0 to Northern Ireland, most of whose players come from Britain's tinier club teams; during the game, you could almost see the England stars thinking, What the f*** am I doing here, in this dump, playing against these losers? (The fact that the losers were winning seemed of only marginal interest to them.) It was hard to see the ideal of international football lasting the whole ninety minutes, let alone until the World Cup finals and beyond. And then, a few short weeks later, after a meaningless but enthralling last-minute win over Argentina, we all decided that England was going to win the World Cup. This represents progress of sorts: usually, national self-confidence would have been boosted by a narrow win over the hapless Irish, and demolished by a proper team. Now we have a group of cosmopolitan sophisticates (or blinged-up prima donnas, depending on your worldview, age and newspaper of choice) who can't be bothered, unless the occasion warrants it.

Sixteen years ago, England played out a goalless draw against Sweden, a result that helped ensure qualification for the World Cup in 1990. The enduring image of that game is of the England captain, Terry Butcher, swathed in bandages, his white England shirt and shorts covered in blood that had pumped steadily out of a head wound throughout the duration of the game. "Off the pitch I was always an ordinary, mild-mannered bloke," said Butcher in an interview years later. "But put me in a football shirt and it was tin hats and fixed bayonets. Death or glory." That was the old England: the war imagery, the crucial nil-nil draw against modest opposition, the unavoidable replacement of style and talent with blood and graft. Those who loathe David Beckham, the current England captain, and everything he stands for would claim that he will wear a tin hat and bandages only when tin hats and bandages become de rigeur in some ludicrously fashionable European nightclub. That's not fair, because despite his looks and his cash, he too has worked surprisingly hard to compensate for the things that he lacks as a player, notably pace. But there's no doubt that he is brilliantly illustrative of a new kind of English sportsman: professional, media-aware, occasionally petulant and very, very rich. The England fans who went to the friendly match against Argentina (played, as is the way of these things now, in Geneva, for reasons that remain obscure) were still singing their "No Surrender to the IRA" song, and there's more than a suspicion that they'd rather watch Terry Butcher and his fixed bayonets than David Beckham, a man who, after all, has been photographed wearing a sarong. But then, that's England all over at the moment. We'd still prefer to be bombing the Germans; but after sixty years, there's a slowly dawning suspicion that those days aren't coming back any time soon, and in the meantime, we must rely on sarong-wearing, multimillionaire pretty boys to kick the Argies for us. We're not happy about it, but what can we do?