Cannavaro is two months short of his 37th birthday. He looks as if his brain knows where he should be, but the legs will no longer take him there at the required speed. And, of course, this great achiever, the player of the tournament four years ago, should not have been asked to go there this time around.

Lippi, Cannavaro and the broken-down warhorse Gennaro Gattuso retired themselves from national team duty with this wretchedly sorry result. They should have gone sooner. If Lippi is correct, and Italy’s cupboard is so bare that there are no younger men pushing through, then Italy must start the process of a new soccer kindergarten from which to begin the process of resuscitating a sport it has played so well in the past.

“The responsibility is mine,” Lippi confessed at his last news conference as coach. “I prepared the team badly.”

Even that dodges the issue. He chose the team badly. He clung to the past.

But there is something strange at this World Cup. It is as if the Europeans have no stomach, no desire, no professional pride in staying on a continent new to them. It is almost as if they had the jet engines warming up before they arrived  and England did only marginally better in its group, which also looked, on paper, to be a comfortable warm-up.