England’s Michael Owen and Ledley King during a training session in Manchester on Monday. England will face Poland in a World Cup qualifier at Old Trafford on Wednesday

What on earth has happened to the England football team? I still go to these matches expecting them to be pretty good. And these days, every time I go, they are pretty bad. There is a new reality to adjust to. It scarcely seems a moment since we were all saying that this was the finest England team since 1970. Now we are asking where it all went wrong.

Saturday’s match was the latest in the series. An England team with something to say for themselves would have dispatched Austria decisively, a goal in each half and never a worry; they eat that sort of team for breakfast. Clinical, football people would have said. Professional.

But instead, England suffered and struggled, failed to put chances away and won by a single penalty and might have suffered the embarrassment of a draw. To compound matters, David Beckham got himself sent off, like a bloody fool. If he was a shade unlucky in the two decisions that brought him his yellow cards, he was more than a shade idiotic to put himself in those situations. A single dramatic incident ? and he does love dramatic incidents, that boy summed up all the angst and uncertainty that pervades the England team of today.

This was a performance filled with fear. It was a performance full of “ooh-er, wouldn’t it be ghastly if we failed?” There was no swash, no buckle, no magic; above all, there was no devil. Yet it really was not all that long ago that the England team, with much the same personnel, played with a swagger and a certainty that put the fear of God into teams such as Austria.

This was a team that seemed to be maturing nicely. The England football team, under the coaching of Sven-Goran Eriksson, seemed to be building to a nice climax. Now it seems as if the climax has been reached and we missed it. Too late, or that’s the way it looks, after the fourth successive dismal performance.

Eriksson rescued the team from their almost botched qualification for the World Cup of 2002. Once there, England performed well, so much so that for half an hour it seemed they might win it. Then Brazil, the eventual winners, pulled away from them. But if England’s nerve failed that day, there were surely great things ahead. They cruised through the qualification for the 2004 European Championship with an easy self-confidence and went into the tournament proper with high hopes. We can win the damn thing ? that was the mood of the time.

But then came the black night at the Stadium of Light. It was in this one extraordinary match that England suffered a blow from which they have never recovered. It was a match that shattered their belief in themselves as world-beaters. They had believed that the force was with them; after that match, they can never quite do so again. They suffered a trauma that will last them the rest of their professional lives and affect the way they play every time they pull on an England shirt.

It was that match against France, the one they led 1-0 with a minute to go. Beckham had failed from the penalty spot. Had England been 2-0 up, it would have been a fair reflection of the way they had dominated play against the finest team in Europe. It was a justification of all they had worked for, all that Eriksson had set up. And they lost 1-2 in an inexplicable yet strangely inevitable failing of nerve.

At the moment of truth, they blinked and opened the way for Zinedine Zidane to stride across the scene like the star of a spaghetti western and kill off rather more than England’s hopes in a single match.

England eventually went out to Portugal after a penalty shootout. This was another match they should have won, but their nerve was shot. Now, as the qualification for the World Cup of 2006 enters its endgame, all the evidence suggests that England’s nerve has never quite recovered.