So, once again, England qualify in style. The garages can start stocking up on plastic flags of St George, the breweries can breathe a sigh of relief and the tabloids can start their gradual shift from cautious support to the crescendo of expectation that will accompany Fabio Capello and his squad to South Africa next year.

But is there any evidence that “this time, more than any other time, they’ll do it right“?

Do England really have a team capable of getting beyond the quarter-finals, let alone winning the thing?

Points in favour:

1. The rest of the world aren’t so hot at the moment. Brazil, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands are going along pretty nicely but Argentina, France, Portugal and even Italy have got problems. None of them looks unbeatable.

2. Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard. These are players truly deserving the “world class” tag and when fit and on form provide England with a deadly attacking triangle capable of undoing the very best of defences.

3. Capello. The Italian’s calm authority has permeated a squad previously drowning in its own self-satisfaction. There shouldn’t be any idiotic selections and once in South Africa this squad will be focused solely on the task in hand — and that won’t be accompanying their wives on shopping trips to Sandton.

4. A winter World Cup. England haven’t played in one since 1962 in Chile. For all the high-tech kits they roll out ever two years and for all the efforts and intervention of foreign coaches, England’s all-action approach is not suited to boiling temperatures.

5. It’s about time.

Points against.

1. The number one problem. Capello says David James is his first choice goalkeeper but even if the 39-year-old year old regains fitness and has a great season his history of high-profile calamities will be in the back of everyone’s mind as England advance.

England have suffered previously from hanging on too long to ageing goalkeepers, with the concrete boots of Peter Shilton (1990) and David Seaman (2002) leaving indelible images of inaction.

The back-up cast of Robert Green, Paul Robinson, Scott Carson, Ben Foster and Joe Hart all have their talents but none inspires total confidence.

2. Second striker. Emile Heskey seems the current first-choice partner for Rooney but few teams win a World Cup with a forward who is allergic to goals. Jermain Defoe has staked an early claim to replace him but sharp finisher though he is he does not link well. Carlton Cole is surely not the answer. Peter Crouch offers all sorts of options, scores goals, has great control and an incisive pass and defenders don’t like playing against him. However, he does not seem to be Capello’s favourite, which leaves an extraordinary amount of pressure on Rooney.

3. Defence. Ashley Cole is superb and the John Terry/Rio Ferdinand partnership has proved reliable, even if showing worrying signs of positional wanderings of late. However, Glen Johnson looks like a winger forced to borrow a number two shirt and opposition coaches will attack him mercilessly.

4. Strength in depth (lack thereof). England, without Rooney in Portugal and Germany, were a team heading home. Another injury or red card for the maestro will again end their hopes at a stroke. The squad players generally look a short on class and World Cup finals are rarely won with the 11 players a manager would have pencilled in at the start of a tournament.

Maybe Capello has enough about him to craft a team able to triumph in 10 months’ time but, as ever, it looks an extraordinarily difficult task.

Michael Owen missed four glorious chances in Manchester United’s 2-0 friendly win over Valencia but the very fact that he was there to miss them signals a real chance of the former Liverpool reviving his career for club and country.

Owen’s failure to find the net was described as a wasted opportunity by some, given that England coach Fabio Capello was there watching him, but consider … playing for Newcastle at the end of last season, when did he look in with a chance of scoring even one?

Here’s what Alex Ferguson said about Owen’s display:

“Michael showed marvellous movement. He should’ve scored four, but he was unlucky with the first one that he just chipped it over the goalkeeper’s shoulder and by the post. He deserved at least one of them.”

Whether he deserved to score or not is beside the point, which is that playing in this United team he can expect to have chances every time he plays. He scored four on United’s tour of the Far East and if he fluffed his lines on his Old Trafford debut he can safely reflect that it was only a dress rehearsal for the new season after all.

As for England, the fact that he is playing for United alongside Wayne Rooney will only help. Assuming he starts scoring in the Premier League, and given the sheer number of chances he can expect that seems inevitable, how long before Capello decides to translate the United forward partnership to the England set-up?

PHOTO: Manchester United’s Michael Owen reacts after a missed opportunity during their friendly soccer match against Valencia in Manchester August 5, 2009. REUTERS/Nigel Roddis

The death of Sir Bobby Robson, England's most successful manager after Sir Alf Ramsey, had been expected given his long battle with cancer, but his passing still jolts.

The son of a miner, Robson's career was characterised by dignity, loyalty and hard graft and no little success.

As a player he won 20 England caps, but it was as an innovative manager that he will be best remembered, notably his success in guiding England to a World Cup semi-final in 1990, when his side came agonisingly close to reaching the final.

Before his stint with the national team, Robson managed Ipswich for 13 years, guiding the Suffolk club to FA and UEFA Cup success and twice led the Portman Road side to the runners-up spot in the old First Division.

At Ipswich, Robson brought in two Dutch players -- Arnold Muhren and Franz Thijssen -- who helped forge Ipswich's reputation as a passing side playing attractive and enterprising football.

After stepping down as England manager in 1990, Robson then went to Holland, where he managed PSV Eindhoven, before going on to coach Sporting Lisbon and Porto in Portugal and then Barcelona in Spain.

While he was at Barca he helped to preside over the development of the Brazilian striker Ronaldo, before he returned to England to manage Newcastle in his native north-east.

Robson was famed for his malapropisms. Once when former England captain Bryan Robson emerged from a lift, his manager greeted him by saying "Hello, Bobby," to be met with the response: "No boss, me Bryan, you Bobby."

The football knight will be much missed. What are your memories of Sir Bobby and what is his importance to English football?

Has John Terry got a bit big for his boots by questioning whether Chelsea’s ambition matches his own?

The defender and club captain said that was the reason for the delay in him nailing his colours to the Chelsea mast in the wake of Manchester City’s reported 200,000 pounds per week offer to take him away from Stamford Bridge.

Nothing to do with money. Nothing to do either with the fact that he has peaked as a player and with injuries niggling away at his joints, the England skipper is likely to find it more and more difficult to excel at the highest levels of the game.

Fans of the club will take some convincing that Terry still has his heart fully at the club despite his words to the contrary.

They might also argue that losing Mr Chelsea for an enormous fee to a club not even in the Champions League would have been a good piece of business and not the disaster some predicted.

Terry is still a world class defender but is certainly replaceable. He is no Cristiano Ronaldo after all. He will be one of the first names on Carlo Ancelotti’s team sheet as the new season kicks off but City are unlikely to have been totally put off the scent.

Terry said he hoped to have a good season and then sit down and talk to the club about a new deal….any loss of form, however, and club owner Roman Abramovich might just decide that Mr Chelsea is expendable after all.

PHOTO: Chelsea’s John Terry keeps his eyes on the ball as he falls on the pitch during the second half of their 2009 World Football Challenge soccer match against AC Milan in Baltimore, Maryland, July 24, 2009. Chelsea won 2-1. REUTERS/Hyungwon Kang

Former England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson has described his next challenge as director of football at English League Two (fourth division) club Notts County as his toughest test yet.

Some would say that’s an understatement.

“It’s the biggest football challenge in my life,” the 61-year-old Swede told a news conference in the Midlands city of Nottingham on Wednesday.

“I always said I wanted to come back to the (English) Premier League, because it’s the best league in the world. I’ve chosen a difficult way to do it, it will take some years but I’m sure we will do it.”

Has there ever been a more eyebrow-raising appointment in world football?

Of course a lot of money from the new Middle Eastern owners of the oldest club in the world has tempted Eriksson but there will be many soccer fans who still won’t quite be able to believe it.

The English hooligan problem was at its worst outside Britain, when fans went to international matches abroad. Violence in Argentine football, by contrast, has reached a point in recent years where it is rarely even a confrontation between the hardcore fans of rival teams.

Now, factions who support the same team fight each other. At stake is control over a number of money-spinning ventures linked to their clubs.

It might appear paradoxical at first that just when Huracan have produced a stylish attacking team which nearly won the Argentine league title, their hardcore fans should to go war with each other.

Two men died and a number of people were injured in recent fighting in the Buenos Aires barrio of Parque de los Patricios just hours after the team’s 3-0 home win over Arsenal had put them a point clear at the top of the standings. (They then unluckily lost the title decider to Velez Sarsfield.)

Fighting between groups from the same set of fans has nothing to do with on-field performance, except that a more succesful team generates higher crowds and therefore more business for the gangs (control of parking in the area, the sale of food, resale of match tickets and even drugs.)

La Zavaleta, a faction that had been marginalised a few years ago and kept quiet while Huracan languished in the National B championship (second tier), wanted a piece of the action but the powerful Jose C Paz and El Pueblito groups were reluctant to let go and violence ensued.

The government and the Argentine Football Association via its president Julio Grondona, tried to argue that the killings had nothing to do with football because they occurred far from the ground and were committed by criminals who don’t care about the game.

They are constantly criticised by the media and by organisations representing victims of football violence for not taking preventative measures.

Thugs seem able to carry all kinds of illegal items into grounds under the very eyes of the police.

Unusally, the Jose C Paz faction posted an apology for the violence on a website although it went on to say La Zavaleta needed to be taught a lesson.

The lesson clubs never seem to learn is that as long as they give favours to hardcore fans and allow them to exercise power in and around the clubs, the violence will not go away.

PHOTO: River Plate fans are arrested by the Argentine police near the Monumental stadium before their Argentine First division soccer match against Velez Sarsfield in Buenos Aires September 9, 2007. They were arrested following a fight between two different River Plate fan factions. REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci

On the face of it, replacing world player of the year Cristiano Ronaldo with an injury-prone forward whose side just got relegated does not seem like a great bit of business.

The British media is certain that Michael Owen, a free agent after leaving Newcastle United, is on the verge of joining Manchester United if he passes a stringent medical.

Has Alex Ferguson gone mad? Far from it. Having banked 80 million pounds from the sale of Ronaldo to Real Madrid, he is poised to bring in one of English football’s most renowned goalscorers for free. And Owen is still under 30.

Even if Owen only ends up playing half a season, he will still be able to contribute and his England partnership with Wayne Rooney always looked promising.

However, United fans will hope Owen and Wigan’s Antonio Valencia will not be the only new recruits.

What do you reckon? An inspired signing or a gamble doomed to failure?

PHOTO: Newcastle United’s Michael Owen reacts during their FA Cup third round replay against Hull City, Jan. 14, 2009. REUTERS/Nigel Roddis

“U” is an interesting letter in German. One of the first things that springs to mind is “U-Boot” (submarine) and then there is the “U-Bahn” (underground train) as well as “U-Haft” (jail).

But after Germany’s U21 team won the European championship, thrashing England 4-0 in Sweden on Monday to give the country all three “U” titles (U17, U19 and U21), there’s another “U” word that comes to mind: “Ueber alles” — as in “Deutschland Ueber Alles”.

“U-nglaublich (unbelievable), U-nfassbar (unreal) and U-nwiderstehlich (irresistable),” wrote Germany’s best-selling daily Bild, clearly caught up in the U-fever.

In May, they beat the Netherlands in the final to win the U17 championship it hosted with a national televison audience watching. Last July, Germany won the U19 championship, beating Italy 3-1 in the final. And Monday’s win over England was watched by a record 8.2 million, making it by far the most popular TV show in Germany all week.

England came under heavy fire in their home media for their “pathetic capitulation”, as the Daily Mirror called it or for “suffering yet more agony at the hands of the Germans”.

The Guardian noted that “Goalkeeping blunders are not the sole preserve of the England senior team”.

But in Germany the U21 team were feted as conquering heroes. Stern.de breathlessly predicted this was the team that would win the 2014 World Cup.

“It was great the way they beat England down at first and then played them into the ground,” said Germany coach Joachim Loew, who was in Sweden for the final.

The German DFB (FA) claimed credit for the three titles, with DFB President Theo Zwanziger saying the “good structures” put into place in recent years and the “good work” done by DFB sporting director Matthias Sammer was the reason for the success.

The Bundesliga also took credit, saying they had trained the players. “What I’m especially pleased with is that all the players are from Bundesliga clubs,” said Bundesliga president Reinhard Rauball.

And the German clubs, predictably, said they were responsible with officials from Hertha Berlin and Mainz arguing their good training, investment and talent development programmes had made the difference.

But the big question U have to ask is: Does it all matter? Does winning any or even all of the “Under-” tournaments mean U will later win the Euros or the World Cup?

PHOTO: German players celebrate celebrating after beating England 4-0 in the U21 European Championship final in Malmo June 29, 2009. REUTERS/Bob Strong

What a game.

Liverpool, 3-1 down from the first leg in their Champions League quarter-final clash, went 2-0 up at Stamford Bridge only for Chelsea to surge back in the second half and make it 3-2.

Two late goals from the Reds made it an amazing finish but Guus Hiddink’s side scored again and it finished 4-4 (7-5 on aggregate.) 

European football is meant to be cagey! This pair had met in each of the past four seasons in the Champions League and every game was tight.

Is this the dawn of a new era or just a freak couple of results?

Ukraine coach Oleksiy Mykhaylychenko said his players had been overawed by the Wembley atmosphere in their 2-1 World Cup defeat by England but their nerves must have been based on the twin-towered mystique of the old stadium rather than the soulless feeling of the new.

At a cost of 800 million pounds ($1.15 billion), the new Wembley undoubtedly looks impressive and there was no hint of the credit crunch as the wine flowed in the packed private dining suites before the game.

Out in the seats, however, any hope of building a rip-roaring atmosphere before the game continues to be undone by the FA’s obsession with deafening announcements.

In the 30 minutes before kick off on Wednesday fans were treated to a spoof comedy show involving the England players, a lengthy film pleading for respect for referees in amateur football — including the chance to receive the FA’s own guide to parental behaviour — and pleas for the fans to respect the national anthems.

There were also the obligatory sales pitches for the new England kit, available now for “just 50 pounds ($72.76).

By the time the players kicked off, the near-90,000 supporters in the stadium appeared to be relishing the peace rather than getting behind their heroes (although Wayne Rooney said he was happy enough with the noise).

England fans bow to no-one when it comes to the noise they make at tournaments, but on home soil they are second division in comparison with the likes of Turkey and Croatia, who have their stadiums rocking hours before kick-off.

The result on Wednesday was a subdued atmosphere that seeped onto the pitch as England produced a flat performance.

Hanging on to Peter Crouch’s 39th-minute opener, their 100 percent start to the campaign looked to be over when Andriy Shevchenko levelled after 74 minutes.

Only then did the players rouse themselves and, helped by some belated crowd encouragement, claimed their win through captain John Terry five minutes from time.