AT LAST, with the World Cup almost upon us and their first match, against Paraguay, a week tomorrow, England have unveiled their real secret weapon.

No, it’s not Theo Walcott. Nor is it the newly unleashed Steven Gerrard, nor the newly evolving Jamie Carragher. And it’s not Peter Crouch knocking them down from just beneath the cloud base, and it’s not Michael Owen as the Lone Ranger. It’s not even the miraculously demetatarselled Wayne Rooney.

No, it’s the emergence of a certain shy, retiring, humdrum, workaday, journeyman sort of footballer, a player whose quiet excellence tends to get overlooked in the drama of events all around him, but whose understated worth is the difference between victory and defeat.

You know, old whatsisname. With the rather unexceptional haircut. Played wide right against Hungary on Tuesday, made two goals — would have been more if his team-mates had dealt with the chances better. Played a game of dynamic intelligence, movement, co-operation. A supersolid team man.

Beckham. Of course it was, I’ll forget my own name next. David Beckham. How strange it is to be going into a tournament with Beckham as the most overlooked and underrated player in the side.

The myth has taken hold: Beckham is past it, he’s only in the team because of his occult hold on Sven-Göran Eriksson. Any real man would have dropped him years ago. A shadow of his former self — and he was overrated then.

Three of the past four big tournaments have been Beckham events. As we build up to the World Cup finals, Beckham has become the forgotten man of English football. In all the fuss about Rooney, Gerrard and so forth, Tuesday’s fizzing, curling crosses — echt Beckham — were scarcely noticed.

Eight years ago, Beckham was said to have cost England the World Cup after his profoundly silly sending-off against Argentina. Four years later, England made the finals on the back of his immortal one-man show against Greece. But then he broke a bone in his foot, called the metatarsal. All the run-up to the tournament was devoted to that little bone. The Sun led its front page with a picture of the foot and invited the nation to use it for a mass faith-healing experiment. Beckham played but was never fully fit, and England’s intermittently promising campaign ended in disappointment.

The European Championship two years on was supposed to be the occasion when Beckham led England to the ultimate consolation prize. It failed to happen because of Beckham’s personal failure of nerve. He missed a penalty against France when England were a goal up; they lost 2-1 thanks to the last-minute genius of Zinédine Zidane.

After that, they went out to Portugal in the quarter-finals on penalties. Beckham did his leading-from-the-front act and took the first penalty, as a captain should. Missed the bloody thing.

It was at that moment that Beckham realised, and his most serious admirers accepted, that he would never be great. Not great as in Zidane, anyway. What people failed to understand is that Beckham did not therefore become a poor player. He just showed that he was less good than he — than we — had hoped.

And so, inevitably, he contracted Henman’s Syndrome. This is the punishment we visit on those who have made us hope too much. Henman was at one stage No 4 in the world, but he never won Wimbledon and so he is regarded as a miserable failure. He was very good indeed, but we wanted him to be still better. As a result, he is reviled as a loser.

When hope is disappointed we get awfully vindictive. If you doubt me, read the papers after England have been knocked out of the World Cup.