ENGLAND’S PLAYERS consider themselves blighted by their reputation as the “golden generation”, a moniker first granted them by the former chief executive of the Football Association Adam Crozier. Frank Lampard stresses they would be worthy of the tag only should they triumph at a major finals.

Crozier coined the phrase for a crop of players that included Lampard, John Terry, Steven Gerrard, David Beckham and, more recently, Wayne Rooney during the giddy, early days of Sven-Goran Eriksson’s reign, but it has weighed heavy at times on the squad. Indeed, their failure to qualify for Euro 2008 prompted Lord Mawhinney, the Football League chairman and an FA board member, to bemoan: “If this is the golden generation, the sooner we move away from the gold standard the better.”

Better times potentially lie ahead under Fabio Capello, with qualification for the 2010 World Cup secured ahead of tomorrow’s final qualifier against Belarus, though the current crop still feel uncomfortable with the term.

“The whole golden generation thing is quite frustrating for us players,” Lampard said. “We didn’t make it up. Adam Crozier did, and look what happened to him. It is difficult. People talk about the golden generation because we have a good crop of players. They are very talented individuals, but we have not made the most of it. We have all held our hands up to that many times.

“We haven’t followed through with it in terms of what people expected us to achieve, and the proof is always in the pudding. Once we have finished playing and, hopefully, have won something, then we can talk about generations and, at the moment, we are in better shape than we have been.”

While Lampard celebrates a decade as an England player with his own form thriving, one of the other key members of that much heralded group of players, Rio Ferdinand, is enduring a personal downturn in his fortunes. Niggling injuries over the past 12 months appear to have left him ring-rusty, with lapses in concentration blighting his displays against Holland and Ukraine this season to suggest a return to the bad old days when the Manchester United centre-half was more prone to defensive aberrations.

Ferdinand conceded last week that his inclusion in Capello’s squad for the tournament next summer may hinge upon his retaining match fitness, though he will be anxious to offer a more watertight display against Belarus to erase the memory of his 14th-minute blunder that allowed Artem Milevskiy a free run on goal in Dnipropetrovsk on Saturday.

Guardian Service