The POP group Boyzone entertained Wembley on Saturday night. On reflection, a comeback by Scaffold would have been more appropriate following the goalless, guileless draw with Bulgaria which has thrown England's chances of qualifying for the 2000 European Championship into even greater doubt.
The critical knives honed by England's 2-1 defeat in Sweden have been exchanged for executioners' axes. "Off With His Hod!" was a headline waiting to happen, and a failure to beat Luxembourg this week would put the life-expectancy of Glenn Hoddle's tenure as England coach on a par with the time left to Anne Boleyn once Henry VIII had finished breakfast.
A more likely scenario is that a victory for England in the Grand Duchy will give Hoddle a five-month respite until Poland, now clear leaders of Group Five after defeating Luxembourg 3-0, come to Wembley next March.
Not that an England win on Wednesday is a foregone conclusion. In the qualifiers for Euro 96, Luxembourg had a 1-0 win over the Czech Republic, who eventually finished runners-up.
For the moment the English Football Association has to stand by its man, although giving him a £100,000 rise just now might be a trifle tactless. Nevertheless, in appointing people to run the England team the FA is always aware that there will be periods when the going gets rough and the headlines rougher.
This is when Lancaster Gate needs to back its judgment, and so far no England manager has ever been dismissed because of a couple of bad results in a qualifying competition. Hoddle, moreover, has not had to suffer the indiscretions of Sir Bert Millichip, the previous FA chairman, which did not help Graham Taylor nor Bobby Robson.
That said, Hoddle's margin for further error has become anorexic. England may well have to beat the Poles twice to stand a chance of qualifying automatically as group winners. If they drop points against Poland and Sweden at Wembley, even hopes of taking part in the play-offs will fade.
England's problems stem partly from a lack of personnel - with Paul Ince suspended until the return match against the Swedes, the injured Tony Adams still out for Luxembourg and Jamie Redknapp banned for one game after a second yellow card - but more from an apparent lack of will. On the evidence of the last two performances, Hoddle's side exhausted their powers of recovery holding Argentina to a 22 draw with 10 men in St Etienne before going out of the World Cup on penalties.
This has become a 20-minute England team, incapable of responding when things either go wrong after a bright start or fail to happen. "We needed more urgency," said Hoddle after Saturday's match. "We needed somebody getting at people and taking them on." True enough, but the footballer who once did that outstandingly for England has apparently just checked into a drying-out clinic.
The problems posed by a transitional but increasingly confident Bulgarian team demanded not only someone with Gascoigne's ability to tear apart their tight-marking sweeper system, but also a David Platt to appear where least expected. England's movements never got behind the opposition with any consistency.
In the first half, Redknapp's long, precise passes helped set up opportunities which Michael Owen might have accepted on another day, and Sol Campbell headed wide the sort of chance he has been taking recently for Tottenham. In the second half, only Campbell, with a shot which skimmed the bar, and Alan Shearer, with a brave diving header which did likewise, looked remotely like scoring.
The debate about the true worth of the Shearer-Owen partnership is pointless until the pair receive the quality of service on which it can be judged. At Wembley, Shearer remained manacled to Rossen Kirilov for almost the entire game, and Zlatomir Zagorchich swept up with a feather duster.
Hoddle's immediate solution to the growing impasse was to replace the struggling Darren Anderton with David Batty and move Robert Lee, his original anchorman in midfield, wider on the right. This proved to be about as effective as attempting to restore power by holding the candle in a different hand.
Later, too much later, Teddy Sheringham took over the linking role from Paul Scholes, and Scholes was one of England's better players. Campbell's powerful sprints from the back aroused Wembley's optimism, but at this level the further he advances the more his limited technique is apt to be exposed.
Hoddle made no attempt to disguise the poverty of England's performance but his candour did not quell rising doubts about his ability to re-motivate a team which, without Ince and Adams, displayed all the passion of milk monitors at a convent school. Talking of which, David Beckham, his World Cup suspension complete, will reappear on Wednesday for Redknapp.
After the match, as Beckham and the other players walked to their bus, they were greeted by shrieks of adulation from a crowd of teenyboppers. Certainly England aroused considerably more excitement leaving the stadium than anything they had achieved inside it.
Seldom, if ever, has so much depended on winning in Luxembourg. Hoddle cannot afford a similar letdown in Lilliput.
