England Finally Perform, and What a Performance!

Revenge is sweet.

Last night, England went some way to banishing the demons of failing to make Euro 2008, with a wonderful performance against Croatia. Before the match I was predicting either 1-0 or 2-1 to England, but even I thought that was somewhat ambitious.

The performance was so much better than Saturday's 2-0 win over Andorra that at some points I wondered if it was even the same England.

If you don't know the result yet, it was a resounding 4-1 victory to England. 4-1 would be a great score at Wembley, let alone away at Zagreb. Before yesterday, Croatia hadn't lost a competitive game there in the 35 matches they had played.

In the last 10 games, they had won nine and kept nine clean sheets.

Capello obviously worked his magic throughout the week, because England took that record and blew it away.

Now I'm not going to say that this is the start of a new England era. Capello himself has already said that it is just one game, and not to get too excited about it. But a little optimism must be creeping up inside everyone.

The England players will gain enormous confidence from this result, not least Theo Walcott who, after the saga of being selected for the World Cup squad back in 2006, and then not playing regularly for Arsenal, really announced himself on the international scene with a fantastic hat-trick.

Wayne Rooney's confidence will also be sky-high now, after a fantastic performance, capped off with a very well taken goal.

A few days ago I said I haven't seen any difference between the Capello era and the McLaren era. Well, now I can say that I most certainly have. The performance last night reminded me very much of the one against Croatia in Euro 2004, when we won 4-2.

That wasn't the first time Capello proved me wrong yesterday. At the start of the match I saw Walcott and I couldn't understand why he was playing.

"Why is he playing ahead of the experience and creativity of David Beckham?" I asked. I even went as far as to say "He's got no end product". Thank god I was proved so wrong.

It should've been 5-1 as well, as Frank Lampard had, what it seemed to me, a perfectly good goal disallowed.

So one lacklustre performance, one phenomenal performance and six points for England so far. South Africa here we come!