Becalmed before (and after) the storm

Well, if England wanted to dampen down expectations ahead of the World Cup, they couldn't have done better than a soporific bore draw with a poor Honduran side.  Roy Hodgson and the players will kid themselves that a 43-minute delay waiting for an electrical storm to pass allowed their adrenaline to dissipate and Honduras to regroup, but they should have beaten the Central American side really.  Thinking back to the nail-biting 1-0 win over Slovenia in the final group game of the 2010 World Cup, if England are still in contention to progress, the final group game against Costa Rica (for whom Honduras served as the equivalent warm-up) could be similarly nervy and if England do triumph, I can't see it will be more than 1-0 again.
Andy Townsend said Italy are nothing special but on this dross neither are England.  The only thing that counts in England's favour is that Italy are traditionally slow-starters in tournaments - ultimately, this can result in group stage exits, but, if they do get through, they often go a long way; so it is best that England face them first.  A failure to win in their last seven matches, including a humiliating draw with Luxembourg in Italy, means their squad can only be upbeat in the manufactured way that their English counterparts currently exhibit.
I may be iconoclastic here but I don't see why Daniel Sturridge is a guaranteed starter in the England first team.  He strikes me as another Andy Cole - a brilliant servant for his club(s), but a fish out of water on the international circuit.  Cole was tried by about five different managers, each seeking to harness his shooting talent that was displayed regularly in league football but he never got into his stride, scoring on his 13th and, ironically, last appearance (in injury time, the third goal of a 3-1 victory over Albania in Tirana).  Sturridge has slightly better stats than Cole with four goals in his 11 games for the England senior side, but burrowing down, the opponents were not titans of the game.  Sturridge scored a solitary goal in an 8-0 hammering of San Marino; he was allowed to take a penalty against Montenegro with the game already in the bag at 3-1; and he scored a single goal in a 3-0 pasting of an under-strength Peru side (you may be retired but Nobby Solano, where are you?) at Wembley.  The only goal of merit against a half-decent side was the winning (and only) goal of the game against Denmark in a friendly at Wembley (natch).
The inevitable retort is: who would you put in Sturridge's place?  I was disappointed that Peter Crouch has been cast into exile, though he has fallen foul of the international referees' union with negative briefings about him because Crouch's height means he falls down in stages.  Andy Carroll offers something different and should be fresh after being injured for the first half of last season - cruel commentators say he's a throwback to the Stone Age just because he's a big lad who heads a lot of goals; it is forgotten that this didn't do Alan Shearer or England any harm.  Maybe there was too much similarity with Rickie Lambert. Neither do I think Southampton's Jay Rodriguez has been given a fair crack at the whip (unlike his south coast alumni Lambert and Adam Lallana), a single cap for England hardly enough to demonstrate his talents.  Just as I am constantly amazed that the error-strewn Glen Johnson is an international player (primarily because no-one else can fill his position at England), Sturridge doesn't do it for me.  Danny Welbeck or Rickie Lambert should be ahead of him in the pecking order.  Then again, bar Joe Hart and Steven Gerrard, I am underwhelmed by the entire England squad and though I don't think they will do as bad as some people are predicting, it would be no shock if they lost all three of their World Cup group games.