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Well, there’s a surprise. Amid fanfare and hype, an English football team heads off to an international competition with dreams of riches and glory beyond measure dancing before their eyes.

A pumped-up media has the whole country eating out of its hands with tales of Wayne Rooney’s greatness — on a par with Lionel Messi no less — and the “Golden Generation.”

More by luck than inspiration or invention, England found itself in the Round of 16 against a familiar foe, Germany. After 90 enfeebled minutes in Bloemfontein, the men in red must have wished the pitch could have swallowed them up.

Many fans must have wished they’d stayed at home and continued to shine in the insular environment of the Best League in the World™, the English Premier League.

After weak showings against footballing powerhouses such as Slovenia, Algeria and the USA, England was lucky to be even at the party at all. The world’s best?

England was the gatecrasher that didn’t bring any crisps. And at the Free State Stadium, they were found out once and for all by a youthful German side.

For Bloemfontein 2010, read Gelsenkirchen 2006, Lisbon 2004 and Shizuoka 2002. When it matters, when the stakes are higher than Andorra at home, the Golden Generation have blown it.

You just know things aren’t rosy when Robert Green is dropped for his howler against the USA and replaced by David James.

Yep, the same David James widely known as “Calamity James” — nearly 40 years old, 13 years an international and just over half a century of caps to his name.

Less a shot-stopper and more a gap-filler, James gets the nod when others fall short of even his mediocre standards. Oh for the days of Shilton, Clemence, Parkes, Rimmer and Seaman.

Let’s look at the rest of this Golden Generation. Ashley Cole! The man who famously almost crashed his car when he heard Arsenal had offered him a measly £5,000 ($7,500) a week pay rise.

Oh, the poor dear. For the last season, Cole’s off-field antics have made more headlines than anything he has done for Chelsea.

Steven Gerrard is the archetypal Golden Generation player. He has single-handedly saved Liverpool so many times he has messianic status on the Kop.

When it comes to England, though, the brightest minds in the game have no idea how to get the best out him.

With 80-something caps, he is one of many serial losers in the current England set-up who continue being entrusted with keeping our unrealistic dreams alive on the international stage.

Former England skipper John Terry is supposed to epitomize the indomitable English spirit. A tough, no nonsense, chest-thumping center half, in 2009 he was named Dad of the Year while he was having an affair with a teammate’s girlfriend. The English media came out behind their skipper, telling the cuckolded one he had to kiss and make up with Terry for the good of the country.

Wayne Bridge gave that idea the middle finger and England somehow decided to stick by a man who went behind his colleague’s back. Stripped of the captaincy, he retained his place and went on to match expectations with some poor performances in South Africa.

As the Germans sucker-punched us on the break, Fabio Capello, supposedly the epitome of European cool, responded in that most English of ways by replacing the pace and threat of Jermaine Defoe with the power and, um, power of Emile Heskey.

Pop quiz, hot shot. You’re 4-1 down against your most bitter foe with 20 minutes on the clock. What do you do? Well, England brings on Heskey, that well-known goal-scoring machine who turns like an oil tanker and runs like a three-toed sloth.

Again fed by an insatiable media, we like to kid ourselves we have the best league in the world. It is certainly the safest league in the world.

Wayne Rooney, protected by manager Sir Alex Ferguson, is lauded time and time again as world class, and while his form in South Africa was mediocre, you can be sure that a hat-trick against Blackpool next season will have Fergie and his coterie of pet journos cooing he is back to his best.

Terry is considered so valuable to the cause that when he sneezes the media are worried about his future. This guy is considered the best in England — the best league in the world, remember — but there is not a team anywhere else in the world that has tried to buy him. That should make us stop and think.

But it won’t. We will continue to live in our own little miasma, where the truth comes from the red tops and reality is whatever the pundits tell us.


Antony Sutton is the man behind the Jakarta Casual blog and a frequent commentator on Southeast Asian football throughout the region.