PAY a man in the region £100,000 a week and his hunger to excel will be compromised, especially in performing tasks outwith his normal duties - such as turning out for the national side. No matter the platitudes about playing for the shirt trotted out by Terry, Ferdinand, Neville et al, they all know they'll still be millionaires whatever happens with England. Frank Lampard's uncharacteristically insipid performances this summer were a case in point. Ashley Cole's autobiographical whinging about stingy Arsenal - providers of some of the planet's highest wage packets outside the Microsoft boardroom - rammed home that point.

But let's put the filty luchre to one side: can the England players be blamed for failing to muster much enthusiasm when they look out to the stands and see who they're representing?

I spent a few days in Frankfurt this summer, in the company of tens of thousands of England fans. During this time I was dumbfounded to read the papers flown in from London, with their reports of the good-natured tomfoolery of the national team's supporters. These weren't people to be ashamed of anymore, we were proudly told - they were proletarian cultural ambassadors who'd turned the cross of St George into a symbol of international goodwill.

What I saw was a mass of confrontational boors. There were decent individuals among them, but the over-riding atmosphere was one of ugly oneupmanship, predicated on the reduction of English history into a series of military triumphs. Fans wore chainmail and Tommy hats; they revelled in songs about the RAF "from England" shooting down German bombers; they invoked the sectarian conflict of Northern Ireland with leering abuse of the Pope. It was a curdled, confused nationalism - and one that failed to rouse the idle millionaires on the pitch from their slumber.

Modern English football still has, for now, the crowds and the lucrative sponsorship. But Croatia sensed an emptiness underneath the glitz - and ripped away the facade.