If Madonna has the impudence to rewrite American Pie, few apologies are required to tinkering with the chorus of a more recent anthem and observe that this time it is not football but England that most people think will be coming home - and rather earlier than we would, in an ideal world, like to see.
It is a novelty to find, in a country given to misplaced optimism bordering on hysteria, that the widespread anticipation is that England will shortly be making one of those eerily quiet Heathrow returns, with not a comedy breast in sight, and rarely can any major football nation have entered a tournament less burdened by expectation.
'Can anyone give me an earthly reason,' I heard a perennial candidate for sportswriter of the year ask last week, in the abstract manner of an English professor raising an arcane point about the metaphysical poets, 'why England should not finish fourth in their group?'
We all pondered for a while, and shook our heads: Kevin Keegan may not be quite as clueless as we sometimes paint him but it remains the case that, were he to go missing this week, the first place the search party would look is the remedial form at the Christian Gross Academy of Football Tactics.
Success would be delicious, of course, and cannot be ruled out completely (weak teams can be forged into strong ones in the heat of a tournament), but the form book and all other known factors suggest that England will struggle to qualify for the Quarter-finals.
If so, what matters is that they fail with as much style as they can muster.
Euro 2000 has got off to a flier, with four engaging games out of four (not to mention, in the travesty of a Dutch win over a vastly superior Czech Republic, a vintage performance from referee Pierluigi Collina, who eyeballed one recalcitrant Czech and sent off another from the subs' bench).
So much attacking football so early makes one a little nervous that Keegan is poised to send out a 4-4-2 side (with those two Sid Littles of English football, the Neville brothers) designed solely to cling on for the 0-0 against the fluid and flair-laden Portuguese.
No one will be surprised if such a team were to suffer a similar humiliation to that inflicted by Romania in the World Cup two years ago, when England touched the ball about three times in the first 70 minutes; nor if the result is the same.
Let's hope that this is unduly pessimistic and that England at least try to play the sort of progressive football that has eluded them under Keegan until now.
Everyone likes this coach hugely and wants him to prove we doubters wrong. But while the public is always dementedly thrilled to celebrate spirited failure, what no one will forgive is going down to dull, defensive defeat.
It's Geoff Hurzzzzt
News that Kevin Keegan has brought in Geoff Hurst - or 'Sir Geoff' - to the England camp is intriguing.
The official reason is that his presence will 'motivate' the players, but palpably this is nonsense since it presupposes that the players can not be sufficiently motivated either by the coach or themselves.
Anyway, as this column never tires of pointing out, at this level of international football all that really matters is tactics and here Hurst strikes me as about as useful as Dame Thora Hird, the Reverend Jesse Jackson or Peter Mandelson's golden labrador Bobby.
Reading between the lines, the real reason for involving Hurst is quite different.
In the lead up to major games, many of these highly strung athletes are unable to sleep. Clearly sleeping pills would leave them feeling hungover the next day, so a chemical-free alternative is required.
This is where Hurst comes in. Forty to 60 seconds of droning on about the bloody Russian linesman or what Jackie said to Nobby about Bobby and . . . hours later the player will awake feeling wonderful and ready to perform to the usual standard against whichever technically and tactically superior side England happens to be meeting on the relevant day.
A yellow card for William
An argument over News of the World pictures of Prince William at Eton entirely misses the central point. What Buckingham Palace claims to be upset about is that the photos were unauthorised. What should concern them is the Prince's demeanour while playing football.
In one shot, he is attempting some martial arts kick as the ball runs through his legs, and this impression of a dilettante hooray patronising the national sport is confirmed by the sight of what appears to be a rugby shirt.
Far be it for me to preach manners to my future king, but as any reliable text book on etiquette will confirm, it is no more acceptable to wear a rugby shirt when playing football than to wear the uniform of the Irish Guards while inspecting the Scots Dragoons.
Underneath his shorts, meanwhile, the Prince wears black lycra tights - an offence for which, I have often argued, players should receive their first yellow card the moment they take the pitch, the second coming at kick-off.
Unless this sort of affectation is checked now, how long can it be before the Prince is filmed wearing wrap-around shades of the kind worn by Holland's Edgar Davids? And where would the future of the monarchy be then?
