Team profile: England

Steven Gerrard, the aging Liverpool talisman and English skipper, is actually better positioned to help his country now than when he was ranked among the top 10 players in the game. As he has lost some of his former predilection for “Hollywood football” — a peerless display of offensive skill combined with a penchant for giving the ball away foolishly — his game has given way to experience, and the deep-lying midfield role he has slowly embraced should liberate several young, pacy and talented players going forward.

Wayne Rooney, one of English soccer’s most confounding talents, has never lived up to the outsize marketing campaigns that made him the face of English soccer post–David Beckham. But no one disputes his talent, and for England to go far, Rooney would likely have to make a contribution commensurate to his fame.

And then there are the young lions. This year’s team is green, but the amount of raw talent is nearly through the roof, with fairly recent national call-up and newly minted Liverpool star Daniel Sturridge quickly becoming one of the world’s top strikers. If any of the rest of the young batch of players including Luke Shaw, Raheem Sterling and Ross Barkley play anywhere the way they did in the Premier League this year, we could be witnessing a second coming of Michael Owen’s glorious 1998 World Cup debut.

Hosting the tournament in 1966, England notched its only World Cup title in a 4–2 extra-time victory over West Germany. But the halcyon days of English soccer, led by the likes of Geoff Hurst and Bobby Charlton, have yet to be replicated, something the British press never ceases to note.

England missed its best chance to replicate World Cup glory in the last three tournaments, with its “Golden Generation” of footballers managed by a number of high-profile coaches failing to live up to haughty expectations. Now England is a shell of its former talent pool, has a striking duo in Rooney and Sturridge who have barely played together and by many accounts is a soccer nation whose best days ought to be the remit of cultural historians. Add to that one of the tournament’s most difficult groups — which includes Uruguay and Italy — and it’s likely to be another disappointment for the tournament's most consistently overrated squad.

Given some respite from the unrealistic expectations foisted upon them, and finally not having a forward half cluttered by a treasure trove of incompatible egos, this under-the-radar English team actually has the best chance in decades to return glory to the land that invented the beautiful game. Full of talent but without the same cacophony of dueling individual personas, this young team should have a dynamism not usual for the tedious fare that commonly passes for English soccer.

With Roy Hodgson as manager, this marks the first World Cup since 1998 to have an English coach (after stints by Sven-Göran Eriksson and Fabio Capello). But the foreign influence on the 2014 squad is probably stronger than it’s ever been: not one member plays for a club team with an English manager. The irony is that while over the years a narrative has arisen in England decrying the foreign influence on the domestic league there and the dwindling presence of homegrown players, this year’s Premier League season witnessed perhaps the greatest assemblage of English talent in its history.