DELUSIONS OF MEDIOCRITY..

A National Football Stadium costing £750million. A National Football Manager costing £6million a year. Most - if not all - the Engerland players getting (I nearly said `earning`) over £100,000 a week; Luxury travel; five star accommodation, countless expert, experienced backroom staff; state of the art training facilities; every whim pandered to. The classic case of knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing.

And the reality has finally emerged. All that money, all that excess, all that attention to detail has provided the illusion of adequacy whereas the reality is that all those excesses have merely produced the mediocrity we witnessed yesterday. I guess it`s been coming. The signs haven`t been good ever since the John Terry/Wayne Bridge kerfuffle some months ago. That episode quite clearly produced divisions within the camp - a rift in the lute - and which have been compounded by poor team selections, rigid tactics and baffling substitutions, not to mention a continuing undercurrent bordering on revolt.

I don`t think anyone in their right mind ever expected England to win the World Cup but we were entitled to expect our `golden generation` to go down fighting, showing pride, passion and desire. What we got was disharmony, disinterest and the sense that they didn`t really want to be there, preferring instead to spend some time with their assorted WAGs in their Dubai apartments, talking to their agents as yet another shedload of unearned cash plonked into their Swiss bank accounts.

So what happens now? Capello might go, maybe he should, but the suits at the Football Association will still be there to preside over their own form of inertia which will inevitably lead to yet more unispiring and unconvincing crack papering. Unless, of course, the paying public start to vote with their feet and have no more to do with a regime, both on and off the field of play, that no longer merely provides disappointment but now provides national embarrassment. Like the EU and their 272 grams of eggs, the joke has gone too far and enough really is enough.