Steve McClaren's men do what's expected and the BBC pundits suddenly think we should never have to play them again

England did as expected against Andorra on Saturday recording a hearty 5-0 victory over minnows Andorra at Old Trafford.

The Andorrans are largely part-time and it was no surprise that England steamrollered them. The team from the Pyrenees showed no attacking intent and the score line should have been even more in the home side's favour.

As Rio Ferdinand wasn't fit, Manchester United's Wes Brown got the nod to start but had very little to do. With Sol Campbell now out of the international picture, back up to the established centre half pairing of John Terry and Ferdinand appears to be a toss-up between the Manchester United man, Liverpool's Jamie Carragher and Tottenham's Michael Dawson. If Jonathan Woodgate can stay fit and find form while on-loan at Middlesbrough, his name can be added to that trio.

In midfield, Stewart Downing continued on the left instead of the injured Joe Cole. Downing could conceivably be Steve McClaren's first choice in that position as the duo obviously know each other from their time at Middlesbrough -- although doubts remain over Downing's true ability to excel as an international winger due to his lack of pace.

The centre of midfield worked better as well although Frank Lampard was still off-colour. Whether his partnership with Owen Hargreaves will work any better than his ill-starred efforts with Steven Gerrard remains to be seen. Rather hypocritically, the BBC pundits who were slaughtering Hargreaves before the World Cup are now saying how well he is playing. Expect the backlash to start as soon as England inevitably drop points later in qualification.

Gerrard had one of his best games in an England shirt, playing in David Beckham's old right-midfield position and scoring a typically thunderous effort. He also provided an excellent cross for Peter Crouch's second and England's third goal (the tall Liverpool striker now has ten goals in 13 games).

Crouch's strike partner Jermain Defoe scored two as well, which the papers in England thought was a fitting riposte to former England manager Sven Goran Eriksson for not taking the diminutive Spurs frontman to the World Cup. Seeing they also think that Andorra were such woeful opponents nothing can be drawn from the game, it hardly seems Defoe has proved anything.

And a strange bandwagon has started up now, decrying small sides like the Faroe Islands (heavily beaten 6-0 by Scotland at the weekend) and the Andorrans for even bothering to have a football team.

Actually, that's not fair -- they just don't want to us play them at football ever again. The soccer aristocrats at both club and country level are not happy having to share a pitch with the peasants -- the number of international matches early in the season have annoyed club managers who have seen their players taken away from them during early and pre-season preparations.

It's true that too much football is played in general, but do we really think that clubs would let their players have a nice little break if a spare weekend came up? Or would they do what Blackburn did in 1994 and traipse off to Malaga for a money-spinning friendly against Barcelona? It was the Catalans' B team they played and they managed a 3-1 victory -- well done the Rovers.

I'm sure there were plenty of teams around the world who think England should be banned from the World Cup entirely on the grounds of god-awful football, and taking into account the less-than sparkling record that the Three Lions have at international level, it seems a bit rich to suddenly say we don't want to play them anymore - take away the crap teams and we'd never win again.

No one would have the temerity to argue that bad teams in the lower leagues should never be allowed to play bigger teams from the Premiership (come to think of it, most Premiership chairmen would argue precisely that), so why should this apply at international level? OK, so there is no league system for international matches but the number of times big teams play small teams in qualifying matches is quite small - taking Chris Waddle's examples from the BBC link above, he thinks Estonia and Andorra shouldn't be in that group with England, Israel, Russia, Croatia or Macedonia -- that would only free up four international dates over two years.

Admittedly, four dates is more than we have now and Glenn Hoddle's argument in the same article that teams can improve from losing against big teams hardly convinces - it's true that England used to thrash Turkey and Greece on a regular basis and now they have a third place at the World Cup and a victory at the European Championships between them, but getting thumped 7-0 and 8-0 a decade ago hardly contributed. More money and increased professionalism in their domestic leagues fed through to their international teams and that's how they improved. Chris Waddle's remarks that "you could always see they[Turkey] were going to improve - they love the game, there is a big following and it is a football country" is nonsense - who exactly was predicting this and when? And is that any reason to keep them with the big boys?

And why should Macedonia (ranked 67) keep their place in the group and not pre-qualify? Well, they can stay because they managed to get a draw with England in Southampton back in 2004 and even scored from a corner thanks to one of England goalkeeper's David Seaman's increasing number of 'senior moments' in the latter part of his international career. Macedonia are just as uncompetitive as Estonia (although not as bad as Andorra) but seeing as they got a good result against England once they're still in. What a great way of deciding things.

So it seems that a combination of recent results against England and Mystic Waddle's crystal ball will be the mechanism to see who gets relegated to the basement division of world football. I'm sure that the BBC's Northern Irish readers will be delighted with this - their team (ranked 72) were beaten by Iceland (106) 3-0 at home and would no doubt be part of that lower tier.

Of course there is such qualifying groups in world football - in every other federation there are some preliminary rounds before the World Cup qualifiers start properly and European club competitions features seeded sides and qualifying rounds to sort the wheat from the chaff.

But surely getting rid of friendlies would be more useful than stripping small footballing sides of their few moments in the sun -- England will have played two friendlies (the Greece game in August and Holland away in November) before the end of the year let alone the end of the season. Would the dates spare when not playing Estonia and Andorra be used for rest and recuperation? Or would we squeeze in a couple more friendlies? I think I know which is more likely.

The arguments against playing teams like Andorra are part of an increasingly dismissive attitude towards smaller sides at all levels of the game - more and more TV money is divided up amongst the big sides and less and less trickles down to the teams who really need it. As well as not wanting to give away any of "their" precious revenue they don't even want to play the game against the poor relations.

On Saturday, the current World Cup holders Italy (remember them?) could only scrape a draw at home 1-1 to Lithuania (ranking 65). That's the sort of result that Chris Waddle, Alan Hansen and friends no longer want to see. One can only hope they had that down as a home win on the betting coupons.

The next time England fail to crush an 'insignificant' country (possibly starting on Wednesday in Macedonia) this argument will swiftly go on the back burner. Although we'd still want to see the back of such pesky little nations but for totally opposite reasons - they're not behaving themselves and letting us thrash them.

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