England will face Germany at a World Cup for the first time since opera and Paul Gascoigne's tears started a renaissance for the game in these islands 20 years ago. History's hand has pushed the old foes together again in Bloemfontein on Sunday after England finally sent a football team to a match in South Africa instead of a coachload of ghosts.
A 1-0 victory for Germany over Ghana put them on course to confront Fabio Capello's England, who recorded a similar win against Slovenia. Both teams will approach the clash with trepidation. West Germany won the encounter at Italia 90 in a typically melodramatic penalty shoot-out but England are the favourites with bookmakers to reach the quarter-finals. Capello's team have taken the harder route through the tournament and are paying for their inability to beat USA or Algeria in their first two fixtures.
More than Scotland or Australia, Germany are England's sporting nemesis for reasons that probably require no elucidation, however hard the Mirror tried at the 1996 European Championship with their "Achtung! Surrender!" front-page headline.
The two nations are fated to collide. That 1996 semi-final at Wembley ended with England losing yet another penalty shoot-out as Germany went on to win the competition. Since then, England have beaten them at Euro 2000, hammered them 5-1 in Munich (2001), and, in 2008, inflicted Germany's first defeat in Berlin for 35 years. The Germans have retaliated by winning the last game played at the old Wembley in 2000 and consigning England to their first defeat at the new £757m cathedral.
If Capello harboured any lingering doubts about what it means to lead the English tribe into a big World Cup game he will find out in Bloemfontein, where the game will bring both nations to a halt. But the Italian is starting to understand the idiosyncracies of those under his command: especially their low boredom threshold.
With his boot camp turning sour, Capello offered to turn England's base into a booze camp the night before the win that guaranteed their passage to the likely tie of the second round. Stung by criticism that the team's training centre near Rustenburg is a monument to joylessness, he tried an old Brian Clough trick. In their first season in the European Cup in 1978, Nottingham Forest drove to Liverpool holding a 2-0 first-leg lead and Clough served them beer on the bus to keep them calm. Most of Capello's players were said to be too wary to sink the South African lager but the mood on the pitch was more buoyant than in the dire draws against USA and Algeria.
"I changed something. Used my imagination. It was free South African beer," Capello said. This rather stiff surrender to English sensibilities is unlikely to spawn karaoke nights but the players will feel he is shifting from his usual Puritanism. A rumour going around Rustenburg is that the leader's supposed resemblance to Postman Pat has been noticed in the camp. Without this win there would have endless jokes about his failure to deliver.
America finished top of Group C with a last-minute goal against Algeria, so England missed the chance to play their next match locally in Rustenburg.
In front of 36,893 mostly English spectators, Jermain Defoe scored the game's only goal after 22 minutes. Wayne Rooney left the field in the second-half with a minor ankle injury but is expected to be fit for the weekend.
"Today I saw the spirit we lost in the games we played before," Capello said. "The performance of the team was really, really good. I'm sure we'll play with more confidence because we re-found the spirit."
England turned up in an all-red strip that evoked the fires of hell that were creeping towards them after the soporific 0-0 draw with Algeria in Cape Town, when they were booed off the pitch. One banner here objected: "6,000 miles for what!!" This rebuke can be rolled away. There is neither a Ferrari garage nor a six-star hotel where these players could have escaped the wrath of their fans had they failed to reach the last 16.
Capello has reasserted his faltering authority over a squad who were growing weary of being shouted at and fed up with ultra-healthy food. On Sunday, John Terry, the former captain, triggered a crisis by telling the media he planned to confront Capello at a team meeting called to dissect the Algeria debacle. "If he doesn't like it, so what?" Terry had said.
Some senior players shared his displeasure with the manager's selections and high-handedness. But Terry's team-mates began distancing themselves from the move and the rebellion collapsed. "They said nothing," Capello said of the ambush that never was.
Usually a master tantrum-thrower, Capello was more composed as England dangled over the cliff of their worst performance at this level since 1958.
All week he had questioned the team's "spirit" and accused them of wilting under "the pressure of playing at the World Cup".
Here at the Nelson Mandela Bay stadium, England were more dynamic and eager from the start and Capello kept his temper in check until the final 10 minutes, when he berated the substitutes Joe Cole and Emile Heskey for disobeying orders. Another early departure would have rendered Capello's position untenable, though there would have been no appetite at the Football Association for paying him £12m to go. The international careers of the so-called "golden generation" would have been erased and English football plunged into the deepest depression since the 1970s, when the country twice failed to qualify.
It is often said of Capello that he has failed to comprehend the culture that pays his wages. Sunday will be his crash course.
guardian.co.uk
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