The golden generation may be down to its last handful of survivors, but they are not going quietly. If Steven Gerrard and John Terry have made up their minds to atone for the excesses and disappointments of the past by setting aside their egos in one final attempt at redemption, they are doing a pretty good job of it.

Throughout England's three group matches, the two have been the outstanding figures. Others have made an impact – Andy Carroll, Theo Walcott and Danny Welbeck with their goals, Wayne Rooney with a winner on his return from suspension – but the platform for a hard-fought victory in Group D was laid by the influence of Gerrard's calm leadership and Terry's unyielding resilience.

The evidence is clear, and not just in the first-round statistics saying that only Daniel Agger has made more than Terry's 13 interceptions and only three other players in the competition – Eugen Polanski of Poland, Alou Diarra of France and Anatoliy Tymoshchuk of Ukraine – have made more tackles than Gerrard's total of 13.

Gerrard is also top, level with David Silva and Andrey Arshavin, of the assists table. Although the legitimacy of the very concept of the assist in football is justifiably disputed, there is no doubt that he provided the free-kick for the goal scored by Joleon Lescott against France and the crosses for the headers by Carroll against Sweden and Rooney against Ukraine. Each goal, it might be noted, was the first of the match: the captain was finding a way to break the deadlock.

Terry organised the deep-lying defence with particular distinction against France, operating much as he had in the first leg of Chelsea's Champions League semi-final against Barcelona, his barked orders easily audible to spectators when an anxious silence fell over the stadium. To restrict Laurent Blanc's side to a single goal, scored from outside the penalty area, was a considerable achievement in view of their Barça-style dominance of possession.

A different but equally familiar Terry emerged on Tuesday night, when England were subjected to a nonstop blitz from Ukraine's spirited forwards in the first half-hour and again during the majority of the second half. This Terry was the one who responds to danger by hurling his body in its way, but there was also the finesse of a great defender as he whipped the ball off Andriy Yarmolenko's toe in the opening minutes and came out of the defensive line to head away Oleh Gusiev's dangerous cross midway through the first period.

Terry can be difficult to warm to, and many believe that his pending court case should have disqualified him from the squad. Against Ukraine, however, it was easy to see the combination of enthusiasm and tradecraft that made Roy Hodgson ready to defend the innocent-until-guilty line when preferring him to Rio Ferdinand.

At whatever stage England finally make their exit, it is hard to imagine now that either Gerrard or Terry will be held to blame. Maybe nobody will, which would be perhaps the highest tribute to the way the squad has approached their task. The sight of an England football team arriving home to an approving reception would be very welcome to the men of the Football Association who have worked hard to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Whether Hodgson has had anything to do with it or not – and one imagines he has had quite a lot to do with it – the captain and the man from whom he took the armband seem to have understood the need to strip away the inessentials and concentrate only on the qualities that made them footballers of substance. Hodgson's own innate modesty, a quality which does not disguise his self-belief, appears to have suffused, however temporarily, the outlook of players whose privileged life has often seemed to distort their view of their place in the world.

Gerrard and Terry are men of supreme-self-confidence, a characteristic boosted since childhood by the outside world's recognition that they were always destined for success in a job that would have been the pinnacle of their schoolmates' dreams. It is not hard to imagine either of them excelling in age-group games, being quickly promoted to perform alongside older boys. The acclaim and the rewards are easy to accept but are harder to metabolise into a rounded existence.

If humility comes easier to Gerrard than to Terry, both have repeatedly demonstrated a capacity for performing on the pitch as if the team's fortunes were all that counted. The blemishes on Terry's career have been more obvious, culminating in the stupid foul that forced his team mates to play last month's European Cup final without him, but it would be foolish to deny that, despite his physical absence from the pitch in Munich, the force of his personality played a part in Chelsea's ability to jump the final hurdle.

When Gerrard is performing at his peak, something that persistent injury throughout his career has often prevented him from doing, there is a coldness about his demeanour on the pitch that makes him a formidable opponent. If he has an abiding flaw, it resides in his belief that he can do everything. Under Hodgson he appears to have accepted a more restricted role, working alongside Scott Parker as a defensive screen and largely confining his bursts upfield to the right flank, the source of all three of his deliveries that have led to goals.

If his self-discipline has been a major factor in the team's success in reaching the last eight then Terry, too, has bought into Hodgson's unpretentious credo, an approach that puts the next match first and the acceptance of acclaim last. As a result it may already have dawned on the pair that, even should they go out to Italy on Sunday, they are no longer in line for the sort of derision heaped on earlier squads of which they were a part.

It would be fanciful to claim that they are doing it on behalf of David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville, Frank Lampard, Joe Cole and Rio Ferdinand. They themselves would recognise that the unspoilt optimism of the younger members of the party – notably Walcott and Welbeck, perhaps above all Joe Hart – has made it easier for Hodgson to mould a well-balanced unit around a core of experience. Yet there they are, doing the job properly at last, avoiding fanfare and flummery, earning the right to admiration. Redemption is a big word, but it may turn out to be the one we need.