Match report: Germany 1 England 2 | Capello's 24-carat gold reserves | How England rated | Debate: what is England's best XI now? | Agbonlahor merits inclusion in long-term plans | Rise and rise of Captain Responsible | Wenger eyes Walcott compensation | Giles Smith: was it meaningful enough to put I'm a Celebrity on hold for a night? | Debate: were Carson and Bent the only losers in Berlin?

Germany were whistled off by their own supporters last night, and small wonder after 90 minutes of mind-boggling clumsiness. Joachim Löw, the Germany coach, may have been dressed like George Harrison, circa the Rubber Soul album, but his team were playing like Herman’s Hermits, shortly after they split up. Or dancing like John Sergeant, shortly before he split.

Even Germany’s equaliser was gifted to them by this skeletal England side (known as “England reserves” in some quarters and as “Portsmouth” in others), and it came in one of those rare moments of slapstick that you don’t normally get in television programmes that come in colour and have sound. Dire stuff. Imagine the baffling sense of injustice if England hadn’t scored again and won.

And for this, you reflected, ITV had suspended play in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, leaving the celebrities drumming their fingers on their damp sleeping bags and wondering where their next inedible meal was coming from.

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Agbonlahor was far more impressive than all four of Capello’s previous first caps

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Capello’s 24-carat gold reserves

The England manager celebrated a near-perfect year in charge as his second-string deservedly beat Germany 2-1

• England's lesser lights combine to fulfil year of transformation

• How the England players rated against Germany

• Rise and rise of John Terry, aka Captain Responsible

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That was a big call. It’s a brave channel that comes between a hungry Robert Kilroy-Silk and his plate of squirming witchetty grubs. More importantly, it’s a brave channel that comes between Kilroy-Silk and a potential television appearance. Out there in Australia, the celebrities have already been deprived of basic comfort and sustenance. To deprive them of attention as well, if only for 24 hours, was surely a merciless step too far.

Yet ITV had been promoting the football hard on recent nights, flashing the three lions badge at us between adverts in a rather sinister, subliminal manner, and showing a trailer featuring a braided David James in an orchestral fit of agony — for all the world as if this fixture had genuinely nail-biting consequences rather than being what we tend to call in the world of light entertainment, “just a bit of fun” and the sort of event to which you might even invite Teddy Sheringham, in a recession-busting gold tie. He sat next to Graeme Le Saux, the comeback kid, in ITV’s pitchside analysts’ pod.

Then again, betting before the kick-off was unprecedentedly fierce on how long it would be before an eerily smiling Steve Rider pointed out that there is no such thing as a meaningless fixture between Germany and England. I decided to go gung-ho and plump for 14 seconds, despite people around me selecting times well beyond the half-a-minute mark.

But blow me down if, after 14 seconds, Rider didn’t emphatically announce that there was “too much history” for Germany versus England ever to be “a meaningless fixture”. Get in. Sometimes you just have to go with your hunches. (By the way, don’t mention the war. Rider didn’t, and I think he got away with it.) No such luck for me in the Clive Tyldesley stakes, unfortunately. The steam-powered ITV commentator allowed 21 seconds of the match to elapse before he opined, “You can call this match many things, but friendly is not one of them.” I was on 24 seconds for that one. Rats.

Of course, injuries, many entirely genuine, meant that this was a very different England line-up from the one that brought ITV success in the recent World Cup qualification period and a team who were always going to have their work cut out living up to the channel’s pre-match billing.

You could imagine hearts sinking in ITV offices every time another hamstring pinged, each big-name dropout through injury potentially shaving another 500,000 off the viewing figures. The rumour that ITV was ready to risk the wrath of Rafael Benítez by bringing Steven Gerrard back to London for a third opinion on that groin strain can probably be dismissed as tittle-tattle, but you can see how that kind of talk gets started.

Desperate times, though. It was clear, as early as Monday afternoon, that, come Wednesday, anyone tuning in would be peering in mystification at a cloudy cast of dimly familiar names. But then the same is true of I’m A Celebrity.

Still, you would say this much for that injury crisis: it did at least lend a new abstract, philosophical dimension to the frayed old debate about Gerrard and Frank Lampard. Never mind whether Gerrard and Lampard could play together — could they both not play together? Could Gerrard be comfortably not accommodated alongside an absent Lampard? Could there ever be room in an England team for neither of them? Answers on a purely theoretical postcard to the usual non-existent address.

And try a bit harder next time, Germany, won’t you? There are girlfriends of footballers out there in that rain-sodden jungle clearing, you know, and, because of you, we have gone a whole day without news of their wellbeing.