If all goes according to plan at Wembley next week, England will defeat Ukraine and advance a step closer to the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. Faces will be painted accordingly, familiar songs sung, football will, once again, be coming home. But coming home to where exactly?
If some find it hard to fly the flag for Premier League clubs in Europe on the grounds that so few of the players are from this country, then what are we to make of an England team whose improvement is solely down to the arrival of a man who is patently an outsider?
England’s players, face it, are the same ones that failed to qualify for the 2008 European Championships. All that has changed is that unfortunate, over-promoted Steve McClaren, has been replaced by hatchet-faced, super-successful Fabio Capello, a first-class coach, but one who chose not to engage with the English game until its wealth enticed him from Italy. Capello has done a fine job but, considering this is supposed to be international football — the best of yours against the best of theirs — isn’t his employment just a little bit like, well, cheating?
This weekend Israel will play Greece, in the first game of a home and away double-header, which will reveal a lot about the likely qualifier from Group Two. Both teams made mistakes in October when Greece lost at home to Switzerland and Israel drew away in Latvia. It is, in essence, a weak group. Yet Greece have been formidable opponents in recent years, and against all expectations won the European Championships in Portugal in 2004.
For the past eight years they have been coached astutely by a German, Otto Rehhagel. Now, Rehhagel may be an honorary Greek, he may have turned down the chance to manage Germany three years ago and been the first foreigner to win Man of the Year prizes that had previously been the preserve of Greek nationals, but he is still bringing influence to bear from 27 years of club coaching outside Greece. Is this right, in what should be the last bastion of selfish nationalism?
The counter argument is that football is a global game now. Players are spread across continents, let alone countries, the sport is a melting pot of ideas and influences. Who is to say what comes from where?
McClaren might return from working with FC Twente in Holland and adopt a more continental style than, for instance, Sven Goran Eriksson did as England manager, with his rigid 4-4-2 strategies.
And this may be true. Yet McClaren will always be a son of Yorkshire, however daft his Dutch accent, his formative years will remain with Hull City and as a coach and manager he will have been schooled at Derby County and Manchester United. If he has learned to play the Dutch way, it is still the English system that opened his mind to it. And he wasn’t a very good England manager, true. But if he was the best we could find, whose fault is that? And now, are England, like Greece, not merely attempting to buy success using foreign currency?
Martin Samuel is the chief sports writer of the Daily Mail, where his column appears on Monday and Wednesday