England Show Maturity Beyond Their Years

England showed that they can perform on the big stage without their star players with an impressive 2-1 win over Germany in Berlin.

The likes of Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard sat out the game through injury, as England's second string outplayed a quiet frankly awful German side.

Mathew Upson opened the scoring for England after a dreadful goalkeeping error from Rene Adler, allowed the West Ham defender to poke the ball into an empty net.

However England repaid the favour with an hour gone, as substitute goalkeeper Scott Carson and captain John Terry got in a muddle allowing Patrick Helmes to equalise.

But Terry made up for his mistake heading in Stewart Downing's free-kick with just seven minutes remaining.

The performance from the likes of Glen Johnson, Gabriel Agbonlahor and Downing himself was impressive, but the team performance as a whole from a group of players who would have never played together was the highlight of the evening.

I wouldn't say any performance stuck out as spell-binding , it was the composure of the team as a whole that impressed me in-front of a capacity crowd of 74,000.

The only issue for me fell with Scott Carson, who did his best to deny England a victory they thoroughly deserved.

At the time, I believed him playing against Croatia was a mistake, and that anything that happened on the evening was a result of Steve McClaren's poor selection and that Carson wasn't ready to be thrown in the deep in at such an early stage of his career.

On Wednesday night however there can be no excuses, he definitely deserved a second chance for England under Capello. In simple terms, he's blown it.

Only thing he had to do all night, and he allowed the ball to go through his legs and into the back of his net.

I think John Terry is slightly accountable, why he couldn't just clear the ball out I have no idea but the goalkeeper clear called for the ball and he simply didn't produce

Capello as we know already, likes to wheel the axe at the best of times. I hope he doesn't hold back with the West Brom goalkeeper here, he's had his chances, give someone else a go.

I was disappointed to only see 15 minutes of Ashley Young, and for him then to be played out of position was unfortunate.

But this was down to the inspired performance of Downing who started to show his club form on the international stage, which is something Capello targeted at the start of his international tenure.

Before we go raving about this performance, lets spend a moment or two to consider the terrible Germany side that we saw last night.

For as good as England were Germany were just as bad, and for a team who 'appeared' in the European Championship Final just four months ago they have slipped hugely, there is plenty of work for Joachim Low to do.

But of course it wasn't a full strength England side and considering that it was a brilliant performance, and if similar injuries occur in March for the next lot of World Cup Qualifiers Capello won't have reservations about blooding this talented group of players.