Nothing of what I said was unclear, I stated that England was a bad team. Now, that's certainly questionable and depends on how you define a good team. The definition of a good team that I've propounded is its ability to get positive results without breaking the rules. All of this is very relevant as the whole discussion is about whether or not England should be thought of as a bad team.
[ but all of your assertions seem only remotely relevant. I did not claim or imply that it is impossible for a team to have good players yet still be a poor team. There are many factors that determine the overall quality of a sports team: the quality of each individual player, the competence of the manager/head coach, the sophistication of the team's training grounds, the extent to which the players play "as a team" (i.e. unified), etc. My claims were simply these,]
I don't believe any of this contradicts my claims.
[ I am talking about "habits of meaning", a lamentably poor term, but the best I can do at this time of night (morning).[/FONT]
Upon a closer reading, all I've noticed is that you're exploring the definition of a good team in greater depth than I have. I said that a good team is one that attains positive results without bending the rules, yet you stated that the overall quality of a sports team is determined by various factors such as quality of coaches, sophistication of training, unity of players and so forth. From the perspective of my argument one may respond that all of these factors determine how likely a team will be able to win games fairly. Essentially I have stated a general overview of the concept of a good team and you have shed light upon the constituents to which it could be reduced.
Now we go back to your main contention: England is not a bad team because it has very good players. This claim can be refuted within your own conceptual framework regarding the evaluation of a team's merit. You've stated that various factors such as quality of coaches, players, unity (team spirit) and so forth determine how good a team is. Thus, from this premise one may reason that the quality of players is but one factor that influences the overall quality of the team and therefore it is in principle possible for a group of soccer players to be composed of exceptionally talented individual players, yet lack other virtues that characterize good teams such as quality of coaching staff, unity and so forth.
On the basis of this conclusion, one may regard the claim that England, a team of exceptional individual talent is a bad team as tenable.
Lastly, I am going to respond to your second objection: when a person claims that a certain team is bad, he almost always means that the players are bad also. This claim is by nature descriptive rather than conceptual, determining whether this is true is a job for an investigative journalist and is of no concern to a purely conceptual review of the topic. However, from the purely analytical perspective, there is no reason why a claim that team X is bad should committ one to the claim that team X has bad players. In light of the fact that a cornucopia of different factors determine whether a team is good and the quality of players is but one of numerous of such factors, there is no reason to suppose that its impossible for a team to employ exceptional players yet display very poor quality.