Every football team has a face. The face is the person who embodies the team’s values. He might be Diego Maradona, Roy Keane or Alex Ferguson. But the face of the current England team is a woman: tanned orange, drunk, and brandishing shopping bags while dancing on a bar table at 4am. She is a composite of the players’ “wives and girlfriends”, or WAGS, who accompanied the team to last year’s World Cup.

The England team is regarded as the nation made flesh, and the WAGS and their husbands are believed to embody modern England’s worst values. Whenever the team fails – and if it cannot win in Estonia on Wednesday, it probably won’t even qualify for Euro 2008 – it prompts a debate on the failings of the nation itself. That debate has raged after every failure since the 1970s, as documented in the dense academic literature on the subject. But today’s debate reveals new English anxieties.