Restraint goes out the window as the lynch mobs gather

ON THE COUCH:There was little sympathy on the English telly for their Three Turkeys – sorry, Lions

THERE WAS Peter Shilton, minding his own business in his back garden, when suddenly he was beamed live in to the living rooms of Britain, Sky News hauling him away from tending his petunias to ask his opinion on the Question of the Day: Who Should Be Lynched First When They Arrive Home?

Shilts tried his best to assist the channel in its quest to find the answer to this conundrum, a quest largely uninterrupted yesterday by any other news. He wasn’t, though, entirely sure who was most to blame for the catastrophe, but was more than happy to have a stab at it.

The thing is, he said, “We’ve got the ability, but we lacked a bit of other things”.

Like? He couldn’t be more specific, though he strongly suspected the lads “lacked a bit of heart under the shirt on odd occasions”.

Sky thanked Shilts for wearing his heart on his sleeve and let him back to his war on greenflies, and turned to Ian Dovaston in South Africa, who sounded to us like a man who needed a break. Soon.

Fabio Capello’s suggestion that tiredness was the reason for his players’ cylinders failing to fire had left Ian feeling a bit irked, and when he spotted footage of two England players having a giggle as they returned to base after the Germany game, well, he was just a little bit more than irked. “Ashley Cole and Ledley King found something to laugh about – but hey, leave them alone, they’re tired, bless their cotton football socks!” You had to hope the cameraman had a hanky handy to wipe the spit from his lens.

Later, Emma Hurd was no less vexed when she reported live from a fence just beside the airport in Johannesburg, where the squad were arriving to leave, if you know what we mean. “It’s been something of a parade of shame here today,” she said, forgetting she wasn’t embedded at Guantanamo Bay, “England joining the USA, South Korea and, indeed, Mexico, who have all headed to the team terminal.”

What most got on Emma’s goat was the England squad would be travelling home “in some comfort”, when they should have been jammed in to the cargo hold, unlike the fans who, presumably at gunpoint, had paid “thousands of pounds to come out here”. This was an oft-repeated point: the farther you had to travel and the more you had to pay the greater the entitlement to see your team win. What chance would that ever give the hosts?

“We saw the players arriving here,” she said, “stepping off the coach, pretty expressionless, carrying their bags, some of them carrying their own pillows – we just saw Jermain Defoe carrying a pillow.”

Jeremy Thompson almost gasped. Woodward and Bernstein, eat yer hearts out.

Over on the BBC, Lee Dixon called for restraint, stressing to the nation that “it’s important we don’t all knee-jerk”.

But the plea fell on deaf ITV ears.

“Has there been any sign of an apology from the England camp?” Adrian Chiles asked Gabriel Clarke, who was still in Rustenburg though the squad was on its way to Heathrow.

“No,” he sighed.

Back in the studio, Andy Townsend’s knees were jerking all over the floor, the gist of his conclusion was England still has the best league in the world so should be overflowing in World Cups. It was the manager’s fault, end of.

Marcel Desailly asked him two pesky questions: (a) how many of the Premier League’s best players are English, and (b) how many Premier League players are in the leading teams at the World Cup – for example, Brazil (none, if you exclude Robinho, which you should), Spain (one, Torres), Germany (none) and Argentina (two, Tevez and Mascherano).

“Yeah, but,” Andy sort of said, ploughing on with his theory that it was all down to Fabio. “That wasn’t an English team! I see them every season in the Champions League pulling up trees! That’s Capello’s philosophy that he’s shoved in to an English team!”

“Mon Dieu,” said Marcel’s face.

It’s as well Andy was busy, otherwise he might have seen the Channel 4 News. “So, another World Cup lurches from Three Lions to Three Turkeys in one seamless wave of media hysteria,” said Alex Thompson. “England are losers, England are average, England are middle-rankers – the stats don’t lie, so let’s get real and cut the hype.”

Veteran football reporter Brian Glanville nodded. “We have no divine right to win the World Cup, I don’t think we’d ever have won it anywhere else but in England,” he said.

Back on Sky they spoke to a butcher. “Everybody’s just low, disappointed, dejected,” he said, the boys had let the country down.

“Which one of them would you like to fillet first?” he wasn’t asked, surprisingly.

Meanwhile, in other World Cup news, the Netherlands and Brazil won.