THERE is an international team which has been called: "ponderous", "outdated", "dull", "predictable".

Their last home game? "A step back to the dark ages of two lines of four". The manager's favoured system? "Only having two central midfielders and playing with touchline-hugging wide men leaves the side horribly exposed and outnumbered against most nations".

This is England 2013,whose Fifa world ranking is lower than at any time in the last five years; lower than Bosnia-Herzegovina. The big picture of habitual English failure at World Cups and European Championships is familiar enough but what can get lost is the humdrum recent form of the team waiting for Gordon Strachan's men at Wembley on Wednesday. Under Roy Hodgson they have won only two of their last seven games.

A terrible thing has happened to the Scottish football public over the last decade-and-a-half of decline into international irrelevance. Whatever the opposite of gallus is, that's what we've become. Antigallus. So cowed by inadequacy and repeated failures that cynicism and self-deprecation are embraced like a protective cloak. When I mentioned writing a column which would question this England team the response from colleagues ranged from sneering to mild ridicule (more so than usual, that is). "Yeah, like we're great," they said. "Have you seen Scotland lately?" Well, yes. Of course we recognise our own failings. Of course we know that England being 14th in the world doesn't seem too bad when we've only just crept back into the top 50. We know Hodgson's players are better than ours in all positions. We rarely take a break from beating ourselves up about how rotten our football has become. The most likely result in London is an English win.

But surely we can be spared the fawning evident in some quarters when their squad was announced, such as the sarcastic references to the mismatch of Wayne Rooney up against Grant Hanley? How about thinking less about the Rooney of overhead-kick winners and more about the Rooney who has missed seven of Manchester United's eight pre-season games, including the Community Shield? Strachan knows England's last game was an admirable draw in Brazil. He'll know, too, they endured a first-half battering and goalkeeper Joe Hart kept down the score.

Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard: fantastic, and 35 and 33 respectively. They do not run games as they once did. Michael Carrick, James Milner, Tom Cleverley, Jack Wilshere and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain: 95 caps between them and four international goals. Theo Walcott: 33 caps, four goals. A Scotland defence which has just kept a clean sheet against Mario Mandzukic of Croatia and Bayern Munich need not break into a sweat about Ricky Lambert. England aren't Spain, Germany or Brazil.

The inclination to inflate England's strength is nothing new. It's a consequence of the scale and popularity of the Barclays Premier League and overlooks the fact that none of its most successful clubs - with the exception of the Lampard-John Terry-Ashley Cole axis at Chelsea - tend to rely on English foundations. But familiarity need not amount to awe. Allan McGregor, Scott Brown, James Forrest and Charlie Mulgrew have played against the world's very best in the Champions League. Robert Snodgrass, Alan Hutton, Russell Martin, James McArthur, James Morrison, Steven Naismith and Shaun Maloney have all been over the course time and time again against these England players. Strachan was in charge of Celtic teams that beat Manchester United and AC Milan. Yesterday, Graeme Souness made the point that people get carried away about England. "It wouldn't be the first time an unfancied Scottish team have dug out a result at Wembley," he wrote.

The win in Croatia was lucky. Snodgrass's goal came from a highly fortunate break of the ball off a defender, while Mandzukic later missed a glorious chance between the posts. But Scotland were calm and organised, they passed the ball a bit better than usual, and they coped with a team that is more comfortable in possession than England.

Scotland has nothing to crow about. The first half-hour of the home game against Wales in March was pitiful to the point of being a genuine national embarrassment. The team has been inferior to England's since around the mid-1980s, which means the cessation of the annual friendly due to hooliganism should be embraced as an indirect act of mercy.

Let's be clear: the most likely result on Wednesday is a narrow home win. But let's acknowledge their superiority without exaggerating it. We know our place, and let's recognise England's too.