When trying to assess England’s status as they step onto Dublin soil for the first time in 20 years, it is perhaps as wise to go back a year and further as it is to their last competitive match, a 4-0 victory over Lithuania in March.
That victory at Wembley, against the team ranked 96th in the world, was England’s fifth of five in their qualifying group for the 2016 Euros. In those five games England have scored 14 and conceded one, and the scorers against Lithuania – Rooney, Welbeck, Sterling, Kane – reveal a splash of attacking options that should encourage travel planning. England will be in France next summer.
Theo Walcott came off the bench that night; Daniel Sturridge was injured. Add the potential of West Brom's Saido Berahino to the mix, plus Adam Lallana and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and England have a clutch of deft, fast, if mainly small, strikers and wide men. What the O'Neills, Martin and Michael, would give to have one of them. And yet.
No real buzz
And yet there is no real buzz. Here are England storming their group, scoring nearly three goals a game, yet there is still little sense domestically that something greater, something new, is coming together under
Roy Hodgson
. It’s curious.
England fell a place to 15th in Fifa’s latest rankings, published on Thursday. They are one spot behind Costa Rica, an Irish-sized nation of 4.8 million people.
The new placings are instructive and a reminder that one year ago, as England prepared for the World Cup in Brazil, Costa Rica were the third group opponents Hodgson's squad would face after Italy and Uruguay. The assumption then was that, with two to four points already secured, England would get three more against Costa Rica. Not quite. First Mario Balotelli intervened, then Luis Suárez, and England were out of the tournament before they even played their third game.
If that was embarrassing and demoralising, what happened next was puzzling. There was so little outcry it was as if England – the Motherland of football as it is known abroad – had given up on its favourite son. There had been so much effort, hope and hype expended over the years, there was now exhaustion and apathy. When England faced up to their first game post-Brazil, against Norway at Wembley last September, just over 40,000 turned up.
Hodgson was still manager. Although he may not have felt so, in a way he’d been lucky with England’s running order in Brazil. Had England lost to Costa Rica in one of the first two games, he would surely have received the lampooning heaped on previous incumbents.
As Hodgson has proved, losing to established football nations such as Italy and Uruguay – even though Uruguay’s population is only 3.4 million – can be survived. But Costa Rica? This shows our lack of awareness. Costa Rica had beaten Mexico and USA in qualification.
But it also fitted with England’s reduced expectations. When the draw was made, Hodgson had called it “very tough”. “In Italy and Uruguay, it’s almost as though we have got two number one seeds in our group,” he said.
Group winners Costa Rica weren’t mentioned and when Italy, like England, also failed to qualify and Uruguay were beaten in the next round, it turned out not to be such a tough group after all. Costa Rica went out on penalties after being bored to death by Holland.
Here and there, serious questions were asked of Hodgson, but there was no broad movement against him. England’s FA had said they would stand by him and they did. Sven-Goran Eriksson said he would have been sacked after such a showing, but then, beginning in Japan in 2002, he had contributed last year’s diminished expectations.
With a greater depth of talent at his disposal than Hodgson, Eriksson talked of England reaching three quarter-finals during his tenure as if this had become the Motherland’s benchmark. This omitted the fact that USA, Senegal, Turkey and South Korea were also in the last eight in 2002; that Greece won Euro 2004 and the Czech Republic were in the semi-final; that Turkey and Russia were in the semi-finals at Euro 2008; that Ghana and Paraguay were in the last eight in 2010. And so on.
The fading of sincere optimism, as opposed to daft hype, has been a strong pattern for a while.
Steve McClaren and Fabio Capello did their bit in different ways, but then so did the players, Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney among them.
Contrived excitement
Rooney will soon be 30. He has 103 caps. There is some contrived excitement that he will surpass Bobby Charlton’s England goalscoring record, as if a penalty in a friendly against Norway somehow equates to one of the two goals Charlton scored in the World Cup semi-final in 1966 against Portugal.
Some would argue this new realism is good for England, befitting their actual potential. After all, there were no English players in the last eight of this season's Champions League and part of England's past tournament problems have stemmed from easy qualification followed by wooden defending against quality forwards. But England do have good players. They have the opportunity to be contenders in an era when international football is not flush with high quality.
Away from the weak symbolism of Lansdowne Road, away from that infantile band and the inevitable anti-IRA chants, England should be able to show the Irish public that they have a team capable of gelling, of making an impact in the finals, of once again generating more than curiosity.
