LOCKERROOM:What they are suddenly bad at is the basics. Passing. Closing down. Touch. Classic signs of players losing bottle, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

THERE ARE people among us who understand everything. Not just everything but how each thing is linked to every other thing. They are down in the newsroom and in places like it. In the beginning they made Official Ireland and on the seventh day they created Breakfast Roll Man

These cultural druids often credit the beery delirium of Italia ’90 with kick-starting the Celtic Tiger era. Wow! If so never have the thrills of so many led to the enrichment of so few. Where were you, Thierry, when we needed you to save us from the curse of prosperity? As one who was beerier and more delirious than most I should say on behalf of my people ye are welcome. It was no trouble.

Anyway by extension, until Steve Staunton accepts responsibility for the current recession we can assume we are cursed to infinity and beyond. Unless, of course! Yes! What hopes we have of escaping these depression era blues could well be invested in the ongoing comedy of England’s World Cup adventure, a saga unfolding like a costly remake of Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

It’s been a dull first round leavened by the odd piece of humorous refereeing (the US are surely entitled to go through as the 17th team after the Slovenia larceny), a few upsets and Armageddon hitting our neighbours earlier than usual.

One of the TV stations showed a back page headline written in the form of an acrostic which had greeted news of England’s handy first-round draw – England! Algeria! Slovenia! Yanks! Geddit? The first letter of each word spelled it out. EASY! Ah bless.

In Kerry they are calling RTÉ’s flagship GAA programme CSI Sunday Game. In England they’ll need to start with the combined talents of Cracker and Taggart before they can start to unravel this one.

Cracker first. The psychological profile proponents show England in the most sympathetic light. Are the boys crumbling under pressure? Hardly. England is a nation which has gone from greeting footie setbacks with outbreaks of Neanderthal hooliganism to reacting with fatalistic good humour and irony.

Can the pressure be any worse for an English footballer than it is for, say, a Brazilian who knows every television set in Sao Paolo and Rio will be thrown out the window in disgust should they fail to win the thing?

Or the Spanish, delirious with confidence following their European championship win? Or the Dutch, who haven’t had a civil war in the camp this time? Or Argentina, managed by a benign lunatic who has so much fire-power that America might invade him?

With any of those nations whose public fervently expects them to win? And surely pressure is what they do anyway. Eating it for breakfast, Checking for it in bicycle wheels, etc, etc. Wayne Rooney plays in a pressure cooker every weekend. He has a Champions League medal. Can’t be pressure.

We are thankful to Mr Graeme Souness for the next avenue of investigation. The altitude argument. Souness unveiled this one on RTÉ the other night in tones which suggested he had additional information which he would make available if you met him in a dark underground car park late at night and kicked a suitcase full of haggis his way in exchange for the details of his altitude theory.

He contends England got the altitude training wrong. England went up the mountain to acclimatise. They are now feeling weak. Somebody cocked up. The theory places Capello in the role of the Grand Old Duke of York, leading his men to the top of the hill and leading them back again. At £4 million a year (they said in 2007) it is a bad mistake.

Among the many things this column doesn’t know much about is altitude. We do know that when people set off climbing Everest or Croagh Patrick, or whatever, that they take the Amy Winehouse approach. They walk high and sleep low. In other words, they climb and when they want to rest they come down some of the way. Gradually they get used to it and acclimatise. How it works with a football team who need more distraction than a hyperactive kindergarten group is anybody’s guess.

Jury still out on that one but as theories go it already has sentimental value. If Souness is to be hailed as a genius there are several ramifications. The tabloids (one of whose scribes famously described his hotel room as “overlooking Mount Everest”) may lose patience with the detail required to explain the disaster and go back to throwing vegetables but Souness may get promoted in the RTÉ pecking order.

In his playing days as a killer midfielder with a porn star tash he can scarcely have imagined working in a television environment where he would be the Little Miss Sunshine of the convocation. If he is right in his diagnosis he moves higher in the Cantankerous Premiership. If he is wrong, well, he’s laid a lot on the line.

When considering the popular “English players just aren’t good enough” theory we have to tread carefully. We are England Lite. We have a squad filled with players operating a notch or two down from those whom we are about to slaughter. And we have our own overpaid Italian manager who, Thierry or no Thierry, didn’t actually get us to South Africa.

However, the case of the peeing trespasser is alarming. After the Algeria game some poor geezer whose bladder was swaying like a water balloon walked into the English dressingroom area while looking for a toilet. Seeing his opportunity, he berated David Beckham, who was standing there in that little confirmation suit thing he’s been wearing for Uncle Fabio to bring him to the big games. And nobody in the English party had the wit or the pace or the interest to catch him.

(We are reminded here of another legendary dressingroom trespass, Charlie Haughey’s triumphant invasion of the Irish dressingroom during Italia ’90. Charlie began speaking to the players who – this was before Frontline and other heavy current affairs programmes – by and large didn’t recognise him. “Ooo the fack is this?” said one irate man with a granny from Cork. “Don’t facking know, mate,” says the player beside him. So Niall Quinn is consulted in a whisper. The answer gets passed back. “Dunno. Quinny said he has a teashop or somefing.”)

Enough digression. There is little doubt English players are more ordinary than they imagine they are and more ordinary than their pay slips tell them they are but they are better surely than they have appeared to be in South Africa. We have seen them on days when they were so irresistible that one was torn between wanting to put money on them to win the next major tournament or just going home and lying down till the dizziness passed.

But last week they looked like a parks team. It doesn’t matter if migrant workers do the creative stuff at most of their clubs or if the English game is played at a hundred miles an hour compared to its foreign counterparts, what England are suddenly bad at is the basics. Passing. Closing down. Touch. Classic signs of athletes or players choking. For whatever reason. Choking.

One imagines they will get it all together for Slovenia. It is inconceivable such a highly-paid group of players and management could get it so wrong three days in a row. Maybe they can.

The turmoil will produce one violent Heimlich and everybody will get on with it until the last eight where England deserve to be left out of the bus. By then of course they will have their eyes on a spot well down the road, some place they will never reach.