Who are you and what have you done with the real England? writes Martin Swain.

Because that certainly isn’t Wayne Rooney out in South Africa at the moment. Sure, it looks like him, sounds like him and even sulks like him – but it can’t be the same fella’ who trailed a brilliant blaze of goal-laden, match-winning football across the Premier League in the past year.

And who are those strangely uncertain, unconvincing characters masquerading as John Terry, Frank Lampard and Ashley Cole? You’re not telling me they are the same characters who were dancing down the King’s Road celebrating Chelsea’s first double a month ago.

So utterly confounding is the team’s dual personality, it was not immediately clear whether police probing Friday night’s security breach in the England dressing room were hunting one rogue supporter looking for the loo or the 11 imposters in white shirts bearing a rather famous crest.

And no one can be more baffled at this footballing re-make of the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” than Fabio Capello. But then come to think of it, is England’s Head Coach really the same figure of undisputed authority and sure touch who made the World Cup qualifying schedule look so preposterously easy? Or did someone place a pod by his bedside while we weren’t looking, too?

Never mind tactics, players, Lampard and Gerrard, pass and move or kick and rush, when Capello took on the post for a king’s ransom two years ago, his core mission was to get England’s footballers to simply be themselves. And it looked for all the world as if he had done it.

“I hope with this result,” he said after that breakthrough bashing of Croatia in Zagreb in October, 2008, “we have finally knocked the monkey off our back. They had been  full of fear, notably when we played at Wembley. We had lost the English spirit, our aggressiveness, the boldness and our confidence. They need to play every game as if it is their last. . .”

That last sentence has particular resonance two years later because unless England’s dimming golden generation do play Wednesday’s final group game against Slovenia as if it were their last, it will be for this World Cup.

Capello is clearly stunned at the way a team he thought he had convinced to believe in itself has once again shrunk under the global spotlight. Nervous, unsure, devoid of conviction, a shadow of the force which had smashed its way to these finals with a blitz of 34 goals. Our football has taken on the image of those Team England three-piece suits they are all wearing – cut from expensive cloth but ultimately grey and dull.

As a result, we once more find ourselves at a World Cup party but stuck in the kitchen moaning about life while all the cool foreigners are dancing away and copping off with the best-looking girls in the room next door.

Once more, England are a team so frightened of losing they have forgotten how to win, a team performing directly opposite to the enthralling, non-stop, attacking football which has established its domestic league as the lucrative, must-see TV for the rest of the world.

Once more England are in danger of looking extremely silly, staring down the barrel of elimination after weeks of debate over which opponent they might face at the semi-final stage.
Regardless of what happens on Wednesday afternoon, regardless of how much is made of the frank post mortems conducted with his players, England MUST stick with Capello.

As usual, the reactions to triumph and disappointment within our football culture are violently extreme. When Kevin Keegan’s tub-thumping patriotism came up short, the cry went up for a cold, calculating tactician and in came Sven Goran Eriksson. When Steve McClaren’s indulgent regime ended up drenched to the bone despite his brolly, Capello was hired to hang the excesses out to dry.

In 2006, the WAGs were blamed for distracting the players and turning England’s World Cup camp at Baden-Baden into an episode of “Sex in the City.” Banished from proximity this time, you can now hear voices suggesting the boys need a bit of down-time with their Sarah-Jessica Parkers.

But two games ago and by unchallenged consent, the Italian was “the best manager of England since Sir Alf Ramsey” with his methods unquestioned and his rule. Now he is – reportedly – pondering his future. If he cannot get it right, then to who else can England turn? The FA must resist those who would throw the baby out with the bathwater.

John Terry’s weekend revelations will give the media a field day but amount to a common enough experience at club level when results don’t go well. Frank talking and brutal honesty are the order of the day.

But Capello does have to come up with answers and as the E&S’s analyst Ron Atkinson has advocated from the outset, and the players now appear to confirm, all signs point to a formation and personnel the coach has curiously rejected – Rooney up front, supported by a blanket of midfield players fronted by Steven Gerrard and Lampard but including the neglected Joe Cole out wide.

Formations and tactics will only decide so much. Even allowing for the lumpen lines of 4-4-2 which proved so ineffective against Algeria, had they been applied with the kind of tempo and verve we saw during the qualifiers, the Africans would have been comfortably dispatched.

But England will go out of the World Cup if Capello does not find an answer to the more baffling question. Which takes us back to square one.

Who are you, and what have you done with the real England?