Around England football matches these days there is no shortage of people who are not what they are meant to be. Even before he was appointed, Steve McClaren could be classified as somebody palpably ill-equipped to do the manager’s job, and he has duly exacerbated the deficiencies of players whose pretensions to being a golden generation long ago dissolved into a puddle of embarrassment. But for connoisseurs of false credentials the most compelling memory of Barcelona on Wednesday night will be the behaviour of thousands of the national team’s travelling supporters.

All their efforts to masquerade as passionate patriots driven to condemnatory fury by the inadequacies of McClaren and his men could not begin to conceal the revolting truth that most of the snarling, bellowing viciousness came from look-at-me exhibitionists so absorbed in masturbation of their emotions that their favourite insult had an autobiographical ring.

Whatever the significance of sightings in Catalonia last week of trouble-makers sufficiently notorious to have been banned in the past from attending games at home or abroad, it was certainly clear that the kind of destructive energy once devoted to terrorising European cities was feeding the ritualised frenzy of malevolence generated in the Olympic Stadium at Montjuic. Obviously, if Englishmen must be horrible it is preferable that they be horrible to other Englishmen rather than to innocent foreigners, and the mass unloading of toxic vilification can be reckoned less alarming than vandalising bars and breaking bones. However, the verbal violence, especially the torrent of reviling obscenities McClaren had to endure, was so despicably extreme in this case that witnessing it on television was enough to turn the stomach, and nothing about the whole shameful onslaught was more disgusting than its apparent lack of spontaneity.

There was no difficulty in believing reports that, both through websites and by word of mouth, it had been agreed in advance that if England failed to score inside the first 15 minutes against Andorra a bombardment of abuse would be launched. The discreditable goalless draw with Israel in Tel Aviv four days earlier had extended a miserable sequence of ineffectual performances under McClaren and thus primed ordinary supporters to be resentful. But traditional fan anger did not explain what we saw and heard on Wednesday night.

If talk of orchestration of the crowd reaction is exaggerated, at least there were signs that a hard core with a rampant appetite for self-dramatisation had been waiting eagerly for the excuse to demand attention with their contrived version of mob hysteria. Watching image after image of faces contorted into barely human expressions of hatred as the most determined of the manager’s abusers sought to make the venting of their crudities as up-close-and-personal as possible, it was plain that the orgy of ugliness was giving its creators a high. They may have consumed plenty of booze but the real source of their intoxication appeared to be the achievement of having put themselves centre-stage, or perhaps centre-screen, of having emerged as stars of a horror movie.

Suggestions that the money these aggressive pests spend in following England mitigates the offensiveness of their conduct are ludicrous. The paying fan buys the right to express his views, not a ticket to a festival of sadism. It would be a service to football and society at large if the boors of Barcelona gave their passports a rest. Maybe they could stay at home and inflict their profundities on one or several of the phone-in programmes that proliferate on the airwaves. Those shows, though the egotistical inflation of banal observations generally produces a stupefying level of boredom, supply a relatively harmless outlet for the growing breed of sports followers who are blissfully persuaded that their convictions and criticisms are too fascinating to be kept from the wider world.

Attention-seeking becomes an altogether more sinister phenomenon when it leads to the brutish scenes enacted at the Olympic Stadium. Poor, beleaguered McClaren found most of the sympathy he was offered by the newspapers in the wake of his treatment in midweek tempered with predictable reminders that his own gross incompetence had made suffering inevitable. Nobody could deserve the malicious battering he underwent during England’s inglorious 3-0 defeat of Andorra on Wednesday but, leaving aside the usual excesses perpetrated by The Sun, the bad press he is receiving has been well earned. His appointment carried the instantly recognisable seeds of disaster and his fledgling reign has already yielded enough rotten fruit to put qualification for Euro 2008 in conspicuous jeopardy.

That 3-0 scoreline was never going to be construed as encouragement.

Footballers who turn out against Andorra should blush as they accept international caps. Party hats of coloured paper might more appropriately mark an invitation to make merry by gorging on goals at the expense of players who couldn’t be sure of providing taxing opposition for a decent nonleague team. Yet England maintained their recent lamentable form by taking 54 minutes to score, and moving safely clear only when the part-timers against them succumbed to tiredness.

My main reason for declining to join in the widespread and understandable cries for McClaren’s immediate removal is dread of the consequences of another overhasty appointment of the kind that scrambled him in to succeed Sven-Göran Eriksson. The Football Association should let the 2008 qualification series run its course and then attempt to break with long-established tradition by making a considered, rational judgment about his replacement.

Woods rules in a world of his own

These are contrasting times for the two greatest sports figures of the age. While Tiger Woods is poised to drive off in The Masters in Augusta, Georgia, on Thursday cloaked in such an aura of invincibility that Ladbrokes are quoting him at 5-4, the shortest odds ever offered against any challenger for a major championship of golf in the modern era, Roger Federer is reeling from the shock of having lost twice within three weeks to the same opponent. Federer’s defeat by Guillermo Canas in the Sony Ericsson Open in Miami on Tuesday came just 17 days after the 29-year-old Argentine dumped him out of the Pacific Life Championship at another Florida location, Indian Wells.

For a man as unfamiliar with losing as the Swiss genius many consider the most gifted player tennis has seen, that double ordeal at the hands of Canas is hardly the kind of experience he needs as he focuses his mind on bidding in late May for the French Open title, the only Grand Slam crown he has yet to capture. It is liable to make him look towards his friend Woods with a twinge of envy. Tiger heads for The Masters and the pursuit of a 13th success in the majors not only riding winning form but radiating a confidence that suggests he is satisfied his game is close to its irresistible peak. He truly is a miracle of competitiveness and consistency and it saddened me recently when a fellow writer whose work I always find interesting theorised that Woods's accomplishments had come at the cost of spending most of his life trying to be something other than a human being.

In formal interviews the great champion is undoubtedly capable of being guarded and practised to the point of dullness. But, given the pressures attached to his unique status in sport, is that surprising? When he relaxes among friends (and some of the closest have been around him since high school) there isn't much of the zombie about him. And anybody who has watched him over the years at close quarters on the golf course — and listened to the bursts of expletives, often directed at himself — knows there is nothing robotic in his approach to doing down the opposition. Those taking him on at Augusta this week won't have to be told that the talent they most fear is backed up by an animal ferocity.

A fistful of dollars

Nothing is likely to diminish the awe occasioned by the wages paid to leading footballers in the Premiership but a glance at the top salaries in Major League baseball in the US does remind us that we aren’t alone in having sportsmen who can set themselves and their families up for life with a single year’s earnings.

During the current off-season four baseball players have joined the $100m club, the elite fraternity who have signed contracts worth that amount or more. The group now numbers 14 and the priciest of the recent additions, Alfonso Soriano, ranks only fifth, though his deal with the Chicago Cubs is worth $136m over eight years.

Towering above all the other contracts, clear by $63m, is the tidy little arrangement the great Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez made with the Texas Rangers in 2001. The pay negotiated then by Rodriguez, who now plays for the New York Yankees, was $252m for 10 years.