The difficulty in trying to work out why certain England players are being targeted by jeering fans is that it requires you to get inside the mind of dimwits.

I made a brief attempt on the walk out of Wembley on Saturday evening, having fallen in with a couple of supporters. They denied taking part in the second-half booing of Ashley Cole but suggested the reason why others felt inclined to do so. Why get at Cole? After all, his sloppy back-pass was never going to cost England defeat against Kazakhstan. “Well,” one said, pausing for thought. “He is a bit of a t***.”

The booing of John Barnes in the 1980s had racist roots. It was envy of Manchester United’s success in the 1990s that led the Neville brothers and their teammates to suffer.

If we can find a cause behind the phenomenon of recent baiting, perhaps it is the conversion of sportsmen into celebrities about whom we know far more than we need, or want, to. In the case of the Chelsea full back, there was his notoriously self-serving autobiography. And his marriage to Cheryl Tweedy, the pop star, has landed him a few unflattering front pages.

Perhaps the supporters sense that he is too flash by half and, after all, he is being paid a fortune, so he cannot object to being knocked down a peg or two. That feeling is magnified by frustration that this generation of England players has let themselves, and the country, down.

Maybe they detect the same self-regard in Frank Lampard that he may never shrug off, even if he keeps outplaying Steven Gerrard as comprehensively as he did on Saturday.

But, if all of this amounts to some sort of explanation, it stops a long way short of justification. Since when was it fashionable to abuse England players simply because we detect that they might be a little, how can we put it, up themselves? Cole, on form, is one of the best left backs in the world. Lampard is about as diligent a professional as any manager could want.

Of course we would like them all to be humble, modest and not, as Cole once admitted, to be insulted by an offer of £55,000 a week, but sport is not meant to be a popularity contest. Yet that is, increasingly, what it appears to have become around the England team. David Beckham has convinced the public that he would die for the national cause, so he only has to remove his tracksuit to provoke hysteria.

Suggestions that this is a problem associated with Wembley are not true. For being unfairly portrayed by the media as a terrible selection by Sven-Göran Eriksson, Owen Hargreaves was jeered at Old Trafford in matches before the 2006 World Cup finals and again at the tournament in Germany, which rather destroyed the image of England fans being “the best in the world”, as the players tell us.

True, they continue to turn up in remarkable numbers. Few countries would have attracted nearly 90,000 fans for a match against Kazakhstan. It should also be pointed out that many supporters rallied behind Cole. Yet a sizeable section must always have a whipping boy and it has been that way for a long time.

In his newspaper column yesterday, Graeme Le Saux, the former England left back, suggested football reasons. “There seems to be this feeling that we want our national team to play with the same aggressive tempo that Premier League sides show,” he wrote. “That’s not possible and that will be frustrating for the fans.” Others suggest that it has something to do with the nature of the Wembley crowd. Rising ticket prices have changed the demographic, with less committed football supporters. The cost makes those who do attend impatient for success.

But it is revealing to ask whether Wes Brown would have suffered as badly if he had played the same back-pass as Cole. Probably not, because he is not as polarising a figure as Cole.

Sadly, Lord Triesman, the chairman of the FA, declined to discuss the matter. For a man with a lot to say for himself, this was a dereliction of duty. Where he ducked, an FA spokesman stepped in to describe the booing as “crazy”, while Cole’s teammates were dismayed. “You can be the most strong-minded player in the world, but when that happens to you and you’re getting booed, it makes your game a little bit tougher,” Lampard said. “Simple as that.”

Playing for England brings a harsher glare than in the club game and the sums paid to our footballers do, in the minds of supporters, make them more accountable. But, whatever they earn, whatever their character flaws, the players are entitled to expect some proportion in the fans’ response. Cole made a solitary careless mistake. Presumably those who snarl and boo have never done that.