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Stand up your English and feel you could improve the current England team in one way or another, come one, admit it, you're standing. The reason is for the last 20 years or so England rivalled only Spain as the perennial under achievers in international football, if one wouldn't mess it up the other would, and more likely than not, both would.

Will great players in the early 90's such as Alan Shearer, Paul Ince, Paul Gascoigne and David Seaman, we though we had it good. Then came the Golden Generation from effectively Man Uniteds youth team, players like Gary and Phil Neville, David Beckham and Paul Scholes, the core of the England team was based in Manchester and had been mates for years. We thought 98 was going to be our turn, but Beckham's childish behaviour added to our consistency in being inconsistent with penalties again cost us.

Then 2002 came along, Owen was added to the team, players like Sol Campbell were added to the back for the retiring older generation like Tony Adams. Again we thought we had a chance and again we were wrong. Defensive frailties and an inexplicable piece of goalkeeping cost us dearly against the brilliant Brazilians who would go on to capture the Jules Rimet trophy once again.

2006 we again went in with high expectations if the media were to be believed, but the public knew better. We had started to grasp the fact we were a bunch of primadonna's, over paid cooks in a broth that that needed few cooks and better recipes. Players like Wayne Rooney had their chance to shine, Sven Goran Eriksson had his chance to prove his real worth at international level. Yet England tanked, they failed to show anything of the promise of the players combined potential.

So now, with qualification to the 2010 World cup, starting what tips should we give to Fabio Capello to make sure he doesn't serve to the same faults as his recent predecessors, such as Eriksson and more infamously Steve Mclaren. One a man of Capello's football knowledge and wondrous ability at selecting the right strategies and formation should see, is that Lampard and Gerrard simply cannot play together. I keep reading "Players of their ability should be able to play fine together", the key word that the writers fail to mention is that they "don't" play well together. It's taken us around 5 years of being told we had 2 of the best attacking midefielders in the world and 3 managers to learn this. They've been tried in a variation of positions (most infamously Gerrard on the left wing)

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