The England Retrospective, Part 8

"Winner with a capital W"

The England national team might have been the country’s least popular institution by the late 2000s.

This was a phenomenally talented group. Anyone saying otherwise was simply a performative contrarian. And yet they couldn’t win. For Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole, John Terry and Rio Ferdinand to not even qualify for Euro 2008 c…