On The Premiership: If the doom-mongers are to be believed, last weekend's opening round of Premiership matches should have been prefaced by a minute's silence. Please be upstanding and show your respect for English football, which passed away peacefully in a Sven-induced slumber in Germany six weeks ago. Family flowers only.

Nothing provokes a crisis of confidence in England quite like a World Cup.

England is still afflicted by a bizarre, and apparently unique, condition that convinces us Our Boys have merely to bare their fangs at lily-livered opponents to walk off with football's greatest prize. Our league is the best, our players are the most talented, our passion is peerless. Then, one miscued penalty kick later, all the bunting and hullabaloo comes crashing down and the orgy of self-flagellation begins: Three Lions in the dirt.

It is all tediously predictable, and yet the footballing ennui that has smothered England since Cristiano Ronaldo - playing the role of pantomime villain with impressive gusto - belted in the decisive penalty in Gelsenkirchen has shown no sign of dissipating.

Steve McClaren might have opened his account as the new national manager with a resounding thrashing of Greece last week, but did anyone care? Old Trafford was barely half full, the television viewing figures were paltry and even the pubs were empty. In years to come, that 4-0 win may be viewed as the glorious beginning to English football's golden age, but at the time it merely felt like the undignified death throes of the old regime.

The disillusionment is understandable. Hype might form an integral part of England's sporting history, but this summer even the sceptics had been secretly optimistic. There were enough genuine world-class performers in Sven-Goran Eriksson's first-choice side to justify the Swede's bold predictions of glory prior to the tournament, and yet not one of the poster boys - Lampard, Gerrard, Rooney, Owen et al - lived up to his starry billing. Instead, the nation was left toasting the workmanlike efforts of Owen Hargreaves, a man who had travelled to Germany with the boos of the England "faithful" ringing in his ears.

The Bayern Munich midfielder was one of the few to escape the backlash when the squad returned but the public's ire was not just reserved for the players. For perhaps the first time since its inception in 1992, the Premiership also came under severe scrutiny. The argument went that this much-trumpeted league had begun to believe its own publicity too fervently: there was too much money, there were too many egos and there was too little self-analysis. The top flight had fostered this generation of underachievers, and was therefore part of the problem.

But before the Premier League's swanky London offices are besieged by irate disciples of St George, a word of caution: the Premiership can be held responsible for many things, but England's continuing failure to produce in major tournaments is not one of them.

History tells us that the measure of a domestic league is not the performance of the national team but rather the record of its clubs in European competition.

A quarter of a century ago, when Liverpool and Nottingham Forest were the continent's dominant forces, England failed to qualify for the 1978 World Cup and could not progress past the group stage at the European Championships two years later. In 1982, when Aston Villa won the European cup, Bobby Robson's side travelled to the World Cup in Spain as one of the favourites but once again found themselves booking early flights home.

The deflation then was as acute as the depression now, but nobody pinned the blame for England's poor performances on the inadequacies of the old First Division. Quite rightly, the league was viewed as one of the world's strongest, and the same applies now. Having endured so many barren seasons in Europe, the Premiership has supplied finalists in the last two Champions League tournaments and another in last season's Uefa Cup showpiece.

By any standards, it is an impressive record, and in comparison to Serie A's recent form, it is positively luminous.

Last year Juventus - the Italian champions-in-waiting - were humiliated by Arsenal at Highbury while Udinese failed to even make it past the group stage. Italy then travelled to the World Cup with their domestic league's corruption scandal hanging over them and responded by winning the damn thing, and deservedly.

If definitive proof were needed that there is little correlation between international and league football, then Fabio Cannavaro's Cheshire-cat grin in Berlin last month provided it.

Italy did not call off their street parties to mourn the demise of Serie A, and neither should England blame the Premiership for the pratfalls of their toothless lions.