Tricky Dicky Williams waxes lyrical about Croatian manager Slaven Bilic in today’s Guardian:

“Wake up,” he [Bilic] instructed England after last year’s victory at Wembley. “You didn’t lose the game tonight because of the tactics. You didn’t lose because you played one man up front. We were simply a better team.”

He was at his best again yesterday in his hideaway across the border in Slovenia, where he takes the squad before matches in order to remove them from the temptations of Zagreb’s fleshpots. How much, he was asked, has his team improved since they last entertained England almost two years ago?

“Much better, in every possible way,” he said. “We are simply better players, we are better as a team. We’ve had more training sessions. Before that game in Zagreb we’d maybe had 20 or 30 training sessions together. Now we’ve had 150. My players are now two years older. The only guy that doesn’t help is [the 36-year-old] Niko Kovac, but only on paper as he’s playing the best football of his life and will do for another couple of years. All the other guys are no longer 21 but 23, which is important, and we are a better team.”

Bilic’s not entirely unjustified braggadocio aside, perhaps one of the reasons Croatia keep stuffing England is because – by the sounds of it – the Croatian national team trains together 60 times a year.

How many training sessions a year did Sven Gordon take?  Or Second Choice Steve?

And how often does Fabio Capello manage to prise the tarnished remains of the golden generation away from the clutches of the Premier League?

Guus Hiddink took South Korea to a World Cup semi-final in 2002 because he locked the 23 players in a training camp for four entire months before the tournament: they were the best-drilled and most disciplined team in the competition.

Q.

E.

D.

Brian Mawhinney, Brian Barwick, David Triesman: your boys are going to take one Hell of a beating.