World Cup 2010 paper view: The usual suspects finally feel the heat

Saturday morning's blame game for England's inept performance against Algeria seemed to have found its target in Fabio Capello but, 24 hours on, the regular faces around the Sunday supplements buffet have identified the real culprits. And there are 23 of them, not a Johnny Foreigner with a fierce countenance among them. We are back to the usual suspects, the players, and the great and good of Britain's back‑page aristocracy make valid points. First up is the Mail on Sunday's Patrick Collins, as pertinent and lacerating as ever: "The coach believes their minds have been paralysed by 'the fear of the World Cup'," he writes. "But perhaps those minds have spent too long revelling in the perks of privilege rather than the responsibility of reality. They inhabit a world of image rights, seven-figure bonuses, private jets and gated communities." Yes, Capello has a "preposterous" salary, he notes, but the players, "dull of mind and heavy of foot, their reputations lay in shreds across the field", bear most responsibility for England's failings. They have become so divorced from reality and the history and culture of a game and society that sustains them that they swan around deluded by a sense of entitlement. • Follow the Guardian's World Cup team on Twitter • Sign up to play our great Fantasy Football game • Stats centre: Get the lowdown on every player • The latest team-by-team news, features and more This is a common complaint today, one picked apart by the Sunday Times' Jonathan Northcroft. If you listened to Five Live's discussion on Saturday night, you will have heard Chris Waddle's view that the players are bored being cooped up in Rustenburg and need to be let off the leash. Yet it was not Capello but the players who cancelled yesterday's planned trip to Robben Island. Do they really want to go out on the lash? Is that what their club managers' would allow? As Northcroft says: "We know the England players hate being in camp. We know they dislike tactical complications. We sense they prefer life at their clubs. We sometimes feel the comfort zone they want to dwell in is boundless." And if they get their sacrificial victim, "the 'golden generation' will have seen off a third manager. They said Sven [-Goran Eriksson] and [Steve] McClaren were too lax and now Capello is accused of being too strict. Does a way exist of getting the best out of these players?" He is not the only one concluding that there is probably not. Terry Butcher, over in the Sunday Mirror, reckons they have had enough carrot and it is time for the stick. "If I was in charge of England right now," he writes – though things are surely not quite that bad – "I'd obtain 23 economy‑class boarding passes for Thursday's flight from Johannesburg to London and put them outside each player's door so that the stark reality of failure and humiliation is staring them fully in the face." The News of the World's Andy Dunn thinks it is time Wayne Rooney was taken down a peg or two by his manager: "Has there been a shred of evidence from the first two games to suggest his selfless ebullience and matchless confidence is going to return inside a four days? No. Ah, but he's clearly not fully fit, comes the excuse. Then he shouldn't start. End of." Back in the Mail, Piers Morgan agrees, adding that Rooney's petulance about the fans' boos has made him think the unthinkable. "In that moment Rooney showed us all that he's got too big for his boots. And unfortunately his ego's now writing huge cheques that his feet aren't cashing with goals. This might sound absolute heresy but I think the charge sheet against Mr Rooney is growing so compelling that Fabio Capello should seriously consider doing the unthinkable and dropping Rooney for the Slovenia game." Old hands may think it was ever thus – certainly in 2006, definitely 20 years earlier and again in 2000. But this time it is not about the manager, it is not "in the name of God, go", uprooting the Turnip, "spoofer" Sven or second-choice Steve. It is the players who have lost it and stand in the dock as pampered, politicking prima donnas, looking around for someone else to shoulder the blame with one game left to spare themselves more vitriol. Rooney's outburst may not prove a turning point but it does seem to illustrate how keenly they do not like the supporters any more while remaining blind to the fact that we have long since stopped liking them.