Vaalsbroek, a four-star hotel set in the foothills of the Ardennes alongside an imposing 18th century castle, is described by its welcome brochure as an 'oasis of peace'. Yet there's mayhem afoot inside, everyone nods knowingly. It's a hot-bed of turbulent intrigue and back-stabbing and plotting. The Dutch answer to Dallas.

As nobody save the German football squad can get inside, though, it would be a very private soap opera if those elegant walls didn't leak like a sieve.

When the players pop in to the makeshift media tent next door, they seem cheery and relaxed. When grilled, they smile a PR smile, insisting morale is good, harmony reigns and England had better take care. Ja, life is beautiful. The German media take it all down dutifully and don't believe a word.

Look, they say, this is the real story. Erich Ribbeck, the coach, has lost the confidence of one of the worst teams ever to wear the white shirt. His main ally, almost his only ally, is the eternal Lothar Matthaus, who Ribbeck persists in choosing even though many of his teammates now believe, at 39 and looking it in the miserable draw against Romania, he is a liability.

A posse of players, led by five key personnel - Oliver Bierhoff, Oliver Kahn, Markus Babbel, Mehmet Scholl and Jens Nowotny - wanted Matthaus out. Yet, because Ribbeck was the man who coaxed him to continue his international career and the pair of them have been as thick as thieves for 20 years, he couldn't ditch him because he would lose face.

That's why he rejected Matthaus's offer to drop out and fly back to America before the England game.

Now Bierhoff, the captain, was out, injured during an ill-conceived, chaotic training session, and some of the team who reckoned he was giving no leadership nor inspiration were not complaining because goalkeeper Oliver Kahn, the new skipper, would be more likely to instil a Schmeichel-like roar of defiance.

So, tomorrow, Germany will go into battle with a player told by the national press to 'Go Home, Lothar!'; with their main engine, Jens Jeremies, still spluttering after recent injury problems; without their most trusted marksman Bierhoff but, instead, an untested little-and-large strike partnership between a 34-year-old veteran still feeling a twinge from a back injury, Ulf Kirsten, and a giant once rejected by Luton on trial when he was 17, Carsten Jancker.

So why worry? No German fan you meet here can understand why we English are too scarred by the history of this fixture to dare believe the holders are there for the taking. When their players pop a few kilometres back home across the Dutch-German border into Aachen, they find what the nation is saying and therein lies the real danger for England.

'The public have written us off,' says Kirsten. 'Well, that's okay, because I don't think we have anything to lose.'

You can almost feel the sense of indignation growing in the affable Ribbeck when he hears that one of Kevin Keegan's assistants, Les Reed, has identified Matthaus as a weak link.

'I don't know this assistant,' he says dismissively. Perhaps it is all right for Germans to slag off their old hero but not the English.

Publicly, at least, the squad is adopting a convincing united front, though Ribbeck concedes that having the media camped next door 'brings out the egoistic streak in players'.

German footballers, we know, have never been backward about coming forward with their views. Whereas Keegan's men, following the defeat against Portugal, came out with platitudes about being gutted but, hey, what a great game, Kahn was heard after the Romanian match roaring: 'That was suicide. I was forced to play as a libero.'

A wounding indictment of Matthaus without actually naming him. Still, though, glimpses of the old self-confidence surface.

'I think England are under more pressure than us,' says Bierhoff. 'We have one point; they don't have any.'

This is the key to Germany's approach tomorrow. They believe it's a game England have to chase. 'If we lose, we could still theoretically qualify,' says Ribbeck. 'If England lose, they're out.'

The changes he has promised seem certain to be made with safety-first in mind with Thomas Hassler's comeback expected to be sacrificed for the younger, more defensively secure Dieter Hamann.

Whatever the team, though, says Bierhoff, it will pull together without him. He's had a few lunches in the tranquil castle hotel recently where he reckons he would have had to have been deaf not to hear the rumblings of discontent but that was all yesterday's news.

'Again it will be a hard time for the England team,' he predicts, making it sound as if it could be one soap opera with a horribly familiar denouement.