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Seven long months ago, at a time when it was imagined that he had only to click his fingers to cure the malaise that has swept the England team in recent years, Fabio Capello was lauded for a perceived victory at the Zagreb summit. Not the Zagreb summit that awaits when he takes his team to face Croatia on September 10, you understand, but the seven-hour fixture meeting in which he finally got his wish to schedule their date so early in the 2010 World Cup qualifying campaign.

Capello's reasoning was that England's players would be fitter in September than when the rigours of a Barclays Premier League campaign had begun to take their toll - and how we marvelled at his logic and at his refusal to yield to Croatian requests to play later in the season. The problem is that, less than three weeks before the game that threatens to define this World Cup qualifying campaign, Capello is still groping for answers and struggling with the quandaries and the time constraints - light training on Monday, full training on Tuesday, match on Wednesday - that confounded Steve McClaren and Sven-Göran Eriksson before him.

As he sat in the media theatre in the bowels of Wembley Stadium late on Wednesday, after a faltering 2-2 draw with the Czech Republic in the final friendly match before the real action starts, Capello found himself under serious interrogation for the first time since taking the England job in December. It was put to him that England were still disjointed and that, for all his efforts to change the culture that surrounds the squad, the problems from the McClaren era endure.

The answer came back: “I don't want to speak about the team before my arrival. I work to build a team, mentality, patience, everything. This is my problem. I think there is progress, yes.” One has only to watch a DVD of the calamitous 3-2 defeat by Croatia last November, in McClaren's final game in charge, to see that England are no longer at rock bottom, but there were alarmingly few signs of encouragement on Wednesday.

The lack of attacking fluency remains a concern, with Steven Gerrard marginalised and Wayne Rooney again no threat to the opposition goalkeeper - good news, perhaps, for Michael Owen, who may finally start a game under Capello next month if he is fit in time. But more troubling is the continuing vulnerability to the counter-attack, something that artful, fleet-footed opponents such as the Czech Republic and Croatia can exploit with devastating ease.

This, at least, was a failing that Capello acknowledged on Wednesday, suggesting that Gareth Barry's below-par performance in midfield may have been caused by a summer in which he has been driven to distraction by interest from Liverpool.

Perhaps it is a question of fear. Gareth Southgate, the Middlesbrough manager, drew on his own international experience yesterday when he said that “playing for England is not an enjoyable experience”, that “you played with fear, knowing that the fallout would be intense if things went wrong”. If that was true in the late 1990s, it is profoundly more so a decade on, with the bond between the England team and the supporters - and indeed the media - seemingly at breaking point.

Capello has observed that the England shirt is “heavy”, figuratively speaking, but he said on Wednesday that this was the first time he had seen them play “without fear” at Wembley. Certainly the sign of fear seems less pronounced than it did in that final qualifying match against Croatia last autumn, but it has not gone away. How will it be when the real action starts again? Fine away to Andorra on September 6, one suspects, but what of the trip to Zagreb four days later to face opponents who beat England soundly home and away in their past two meetings?

The defeat last autumn led to calls for a cull, for the perennial underachievers to be replaced by younger players. But Capello, having surveyed the small pool of talent available to him, has decided that the youngsters are not good enough or, at best, not ready. Of the 21 players who have started matches under Capello, only Glen Johnson (24 tomorrow), David Bentley (24 next week), Stewart Downing (24), Dean Ashton (24) and Wayne Rooney (22) are under the age of 25. For all the talk of a brave new era, Micah Richards, Ashley Young, Gabriel Agbonlahor and Theo Walcott have managed a combined total of 54 minutes on the pitch in his first five games in charge. Only Walcott was called up to the senior squad this time, with Richards, fit again after injury, sent back to the Under-21s.

Discussion of age brings us to the David Beckham question: what, at the age of 33, does he bring to the party other than an ability to hit dead balls? In his past four games, all of which he started, there has been precious little. “I think you are now trying to find things that are not correct,” Capello said. “Beckham played not only because he can take set-pieces and free kicks, but because he plays well.”

But Beckham has not played well: not against the Czech Republic on Wednesday, not against the United States in May and certainly not against France in Paris in March, when he won his 100th cap. His continuing presence in the starting line-up would be a mystery were it not for the lack of impressive performers elsewhere in the early stages of the Capello regime.

Underperformance remains a problem, almost certainly a bigger one than Capello imagined when he took the job. He can only hope that the start of meaningful action galvanises his team, because right now that Croatia game looks like it is coming around too soon.