ONE usually reliable football pundit remarked that it would be “vindictive” of Fabio Capello to deny David Beckham the opportunity to collect his 100th England cap in the forthcoming friendly against the cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

Well, perhaps. But it would be even more “vindictive” to the rest of us to allow him to do so. If England is to choose players who turn out for teams of the calibre of LA Galaxy then I reckon Stuart Fleetwood of Forest Green should be in the reckoning. (Yes, I know he’s Welsh, but we can always alter his birth certificate). Beckham has been playing the sort of high grade, competitive football you or I might play on Clapham Common of a Sunday morning, pausing every so often to regurgitate the previous evening’s kebab alongside black shards of mortified lung.

As I’ve mentioned before, 99 caps seems about right for Beckham; he’s been a pretty good servant to England and is one of the few who seemed to take international matches seriously. Nonetheless, his England epitaph will read “almost, but not quite”. He was no Bobby Moore or Bobby Charlton or Billy Wright when push came to shove.

I have an old-fashioned view of England friendlies which involves me wanting us to win them all, out of juvenile national pride and jingoism. Sven-Göran Eriksson’s decision to field, over 90 minutes, 329 players against the likes of Australia made me seethe: we pay to watch these matches and we would like a vague commitment to scoring more goals than the opposition. I am not sure that using an England game to metaphorically clear the books, as Capello seems about to do, is much better. Bring back Gary Lineker while you’re at it.

But at least there was the ascendancy of Middlesbrough’s David Wheater to the initial England squad, although he will have to wait for his first cap after being dropped from the final 23 last night. Much has been made of how he has been cut from a different cloth to yer usual Premier League monkeys, with their bottles of Cristal and their Baby Bentleys. He is, we are informed, a “simple” soul, innocent and decent. Evidence for this agreeable disposition is provided by his favoured choice of a night out: with his girlfriend, playing bingo on the seafront in his home town of Redcar. I suspect that England’s Premier League players all started out innocent and simple – even Ashley – but became, over the years, corrupted by money, adulation and hubris. Give Wheater time and I dare say he’ll end up like the rest. He already has a stupid tattoo on his arm.

But one thing is certainly true, and blindingly obvious: if Wheater had decamped from Boro to one of the seven or eight clubs reportedly interested in securing his services, he would not be in the England squad right now. At Chelsea, or Manchester United, or Arsenal, he would be kicking his heels in the reserves, occasionally blinking into the spotlight for a Carling Cup tie against Rochdale. The same is true, to only a slightly lesser degree, of Gabriel Agbonlahor, Micah Richards, Stewart Downing and one or two others. Young English players, such as Shaun Wright-Phillips, tend to assert that to become better professionals, to improve their abilities, it is necessary to sign for very big clubs which will – by coincidence – pay them vast sacks of moolah. Perhaps they mean it, or perhaps it is disingenuous rubbish. Whatever; they should look at the experiences of Wright-Phillips or Scott Parker and compare them with the present position of Wheater and Agbonlahor.

Further, it still tends to be the case that players prosper most not only when awarded with regular first-team football, but when playing for a club in or near their home town. This is certainly true of Wheater, who has the support of local family and friends, has been carefully nurtured by his manager, sent on loan to another local club, Darlington, and is now playing for the team he supports. For fairly obvious reasons, players tend to perform better when they have some sort of deep-rooted social, rather than merely pecuniary, relationship with the club which employs them. Do you suppose that West Ham’s Mark Noble would have played quite so well and collected so many plaudits had he been lined up alongside the likes of Lampard or Fabregas? I doubt it.

Twenty years ago my own club, Millwall, won promotion to the top division with a squad whose members were born almost exclusively within 10 miles or so of The Den; our most exotic import, Steve Wood, came from 45 miles away in Bracknell. Sheer willpower kept us in the top three of the old first division for the first six months of the following season; a willpower drawn from a shared identity and common purpose.

A dependence upon local players may have helped Middlesbrough to punch a little above their weight for so long; a recent dependence upon expensive imports is one of the reasons their neighbours, Newcastle, have punched well below theirs.