Playing to their weaknesses

England v Paraguay: Despite the manager's and the team's glaring limitations, the English hype machine gathers relentless momentum. Tom Humphries has seen it all before.

So it begins. On Monday, Sky News carried live coverage of the England squad's unremarkable journey from Blighty to Baden-Baden. We saw them off safely. We saw them land safely. We saw them watch the German oom-pah-pah band outside their hotel.

We saw them enter the hotel.

Nobody got injured. Alex Ferguson didn't turn up and lead young Rooney away by the ear. Listen, there wasn't even a man dressed as a leprechaun offering advice on cheeriness along the lines of that offered to Roy Keane four years ago as Ireland took off for Saipan. The coverage was dull but insidious. We were supposed to believe that we were watching something important. This was like watching Neil Armstrong have his breakfast and kiss the kids goodbye just before he set off for the moon.

England can win the World Cup. Most likely they won't win it, but they have got to the starting gate and are entitled to dream. What amuses the objective football person is the gap between England's view of their chances and the world's view.

England have some good players, they score some nice goals, but there are seven or eight sides in the shake-up who can make the same claim. Yet there is scarcely a media outlet in England which hasn't let flag-waving overcome reason in the run-up to tonight's game.

Engerland expects. In the end, though, the expectation might be what does England in. To have the best chance, England need to go to Germany viewing themselves as scrappy underdogs. They need to take the thundering passion of the much overhyped Premiership and apply it on German fields.

Instead, England view themselves as among the aristocrats of the game, obliged to play like the big boys do. They try to contain and entrap teams. It's a game which doesn't suit them. Against inferior opposition (even Norn Iron), they are often exposed as pretenders, and against sides from the top drawer their lack of technique becomes troublesome.

Always in the big tournaments there comes a point where England are exposed as being all fur coat and no knickers. Remember Shizuoka four years ago? England took a one-nil lead against Brazil in a World Cup quarter-final. They went into have their half-time tea and their moment of Zen with Sven still holding that one-nil lead.

They needed to come out and turn the second half into an FA Cup semi-final on a bad day. They needed to hustle and work and throw three pairs of fresh legs on. They needed to upset Brazil and win ugly.

Instead, they opted for stroking the ball around limply, trying to look like peacocks when they were roosters with football socks on. Brazil pulled away. England never raised a gallop. From a position of immense promise England succumbed without a whimper.

The lessons? Beckham was played at 70 per cent fitness as Sven obsessed about the need to have his favourite on the field. Four years on, Wayne Rooney is in the same position. Sven's fanaticism about getting him onto the field in Germany as quickly as possible means not only will Rooney play before he is fully match fit, but any interim lineout plays knowing it hasn't got the benediction of the manager's full confidence.

England's style under Sven hasn't altered much. When it came to bowing out of the European Championships in Portugal two years later, all the signs were that Sven isn't good under pressure. Again Owen gave England an early lead, this time in the semi-final with the hosts. Having punctured the home side's confidence and silenced the fanatical support, England went on the back foot and long before Portugal equalised were reduced to hacking the ball away.

Famously, they lost Rooney to a metatarsal that night after just half an hour, and with the kid's departure England's aplomb seemed to go too. Still, nobody was to know Sven would compound the problems by taking off Stephen Gerrard and Paul Scholes and practically conceding the fight in the middle third of the park.

England survived extra time for a two-all draw before suffering the inevitable death-by-penalties exit. The English media, raucously partisan in the run-up, were typically gracious and realistic in the aftermath and conceded Sven had got it wrong again with a team which probably wasn't good enough to win anyway (a view they were entitled to revise after Greece won the championships in unlikely fashion).

Ironically, when Sven drifts off the tabloid radar and back to ordinary football life, he may reflect that the European Championship represented the best chance he had of winning a tournament with England.

Rooney, impossibly young but fearless, was unveiled as a surprise package, even, one suspects, to Sven. His joyful, youthful optimism and outsized confidence had him shooting from everywhere and lent England an unpredictability they have long lacked.

It is possible to argue Peter Crouch represents some sort of a Plan B, but in reality he is a beanpole grafted onto the same 4-4-2 formation. Against a Jamaica side well into their summer holidays it looked to work a treat. Beckham gives a wicked cross when not under pressure. Crouch is world class when similarly unimpeded.

England didn't show much else in terms of invention and, having gone away with a 6-0 win, flew off to Germany telling themselves everything was alright with the world.

The trouble is that Sven has picked a shallow squad. He has accommodated Rooney, who hasn't played football since April and is required to reach World Cup pace at the World Cup itself.

If we assume times have changed and every centre half who plays on Rooney won't be landing on his metatarsal every time he jumps for a ball, it is difficult to see him being effective before the quarter-finals, at best. In his absence England may plod.

Sven's team is a gamble on potential over solidity. Assuming Stewart Downing, Aaron Lennon and Theo Walcott will be kept behind a glass panel with a sign instructing passersby to break only in the case of emergency, he is down to limited options. This week's injury scare with Gerrard makes that point quite starkly.

Up front, Owen will be partnered by Crouch in a little-and-large combo which may not produce the sort of ball Owen loves to run onto.

Crouch, who took a long time to come to terms with the demands of the game at Liverpool, shouldn't be fooled by the romp against Jamaica. Scoring goals at tournament level is another step up. For confirmation, he need only ask Owen, who is remembered for that wonderful score against Argentina eight years ago in St Etienne and for not too many other goals. He has never scored more than twice in a major tournament.

The appalling vista for Sven is that Crouch may struggle, look like a stick and give plenty of ball away. If that happens England don't have many credible attacking options until such time as the Miracle of Wayne's Metatarsal is verified and complete.

Sven seems settled on the idea of playing Crouch up front as a lighthouse and leaving Owen to work off him. It would have been interesting, however, if he had looked at playing Joe Cole behind Owen or pushing Gerrard up into that position, allowing himself to create the space for a holding midfielder. Sven is a conservative, though, and only tends to resort to tinkering when he is under pressure in tournaments.

The English midfield has a settled look, but there are problems in terms of pace and in terms of settling on a player good enough to both play that holding role and make decent passes from there.

On the right, Beckham is wonderful when he has time and space. Under pressure, as he often is at big tournaments, he can struggle.

Cole can be a huge asset, though he lacks consistency, and games can pass him by.

At the back, there are those who believe in Rio Ferdinand and there are the rest of us who find his lapses in concentration too frequent and catastrophic for him to be credible. Beside him John Terry is a fine player in the traditional English mould and a little short of pace.

Sol Campbell's personal problems took him from the running and it's hard to argue that without him England are any stronger than they have been. And Gary Neville's claims to be a top-class international full back? Where do we begin?

Only in goal, where Paul Robinson is an improvement on David Seaman and David James combined, are England stronger than they have been.

And yet England persist in expecting, persist in the belief their team can play in the style of their betters and overcome.

The frightening thing is that the great big balloon filled with the hot air of hype is going to get bigger and bigger over the next couple of weeks.

The tabloids who have turned the business of supporting England into a compulsory test of patriotism will pull the trigger sometime soon and a scandal, an outrage or an immense falsehood will break over the boys cloistered away in Baden-Baden.

And England will roll on towards the last eight, where the big boys await. There the familiar pattern will unfold. England settling back to play a containment game just like Sven showed them on the television. They'll be conservative, they'll play cat and mouse, they'll counterattack. They'll let the opposition dictate the play and the tempo.

They'll get beaten because they decline to do the things an England team should naturally do. They will opt not to play within their limitations and to compensate with physicality and heart.

Even if Rooney is back they won't learn from what he gives them or from why Sven loves him. Two years ago it was right to wonder if the 18-year-old would have the temperament to last the pace at the top of the game.

He achieved a lot quickly, and tabloid notoriety seemed to come along as part of the package. It's reasonable to assume now, however, that he is not going to be the next Paul Gascoigne. What makes him great is the fire in his gut and the devilment in his play: the fact he respects nobody and will play the same way regardless of the opposition.

England need that gutsiness, that wildness, that exuberant physicality, all through the park. Instead, they have Sven and his addiction to popularity and conservative football, they have the entire hype machine working in overdrive and they have the big boys waiting in the long grass smirking.

It all begins this evening in Frankfurt.

Where it will end we don't know, but the manner of it will be familiar.