Ukraine v England: Jack Wilshere eclipsed on the night he excepted to shine in World Cup qualifier in Kiev But even though international football is often way below the standards set by the Champions League, these games have a way of shining a brutally unforgiving light on individual talent. Four draws in eight matches have raised England to the summit in their group with two home games left. But Moldova and San Marino are the only teams they have beaten. Playing like this, they would be vulnerable to both Poland and Montenegro at home next month. The return of Wayne Rooney, Daniel Sturridge and Danny Welbeck will help, but a pattern is already set of struggle, of scraping points together. Wilshere has played against better teams than Ukraine. He has faced superior opposition in the Premier League. Nothing about Mikhail Fomenko's side would have caused him to feel overawed or out of his depth. In the peculiar swirl of a big qualifying game, though, there is a pulling down of individual ability, so that giving the ball away and peripheral blindness become the English norm. The idea has been that England need to rise to Wilshere's potential. In the event Wilshere dropped to the English average. Even staying on his feet seemed hard as he attempted to apply some kind of direction and tempo at the forward tip of England's three-man midfield. Two things were obvious. The stop-start nature of his club career is a problem. And he is not yet ready to shape a game of this type in his stylish image. He was not the only one to be dizzied by the occasion and early Ukrainian energy, which hid a shortage of composure and finishing prowess. In a turbulent first half, Frank Lampard's 100th appearance was not one for the scrapbook, except numerically. Southampton's Rickie Lambert, playing his first competitive game abroad, was not a Saint marching in so much as a local parson struggling to find his feet. "My game is fair play," Steven Gerrard said before kick-off, reading from his Fifa mission statement. Au contraire. England's game was avoiding defeat: a hellish prospect that would have cast severe doubt on their presence at next summer's World Cup in Brazil. Talk of where they might stay - would the Copacabana be too noisy, chaps? - runs alongside a desperate fear of the carnival starting without them. On that very subject, Roy Hodgson said before the start: "Fear plays a part in our lives. It plays a part in peoples" lives outside of football. If you've got ambition to do your job well the fear that things might not go the way you'd want them to go is always there living with us. I think you've got to be sometimes bold enough to trust in what you can do, and believe in what you can do. These are the kind of philosophical discussions England are forced to have when qualifying turns out to be a slog. Wilshere lasted 67 minutes before giving way to Ashley Young, with James Milner moving in from the flank. A more obvious solution to the young Arsenal man's ineffectiveness would have been to bring Michael Carrick on and push Gerrard closer to Lambert. While Young offered greater dynamism down the left, Milner is hardly a classic No10. His only calling card in that role was going to be industry. When Kyle Walker conceded a free-kick on the edge of England's penalty area, and Yevhen Konoplyanka curled a deflected free-kick wide of Joe Hart's left-hand post, you could feel the tension rise to discombobulating levels. In truth a more clinical side than Ukraine, who miss a finisher as good as Andrei Shevchenko in his prime, would have buried England here. When Artem Fedetskiy headed tamely into Hart's gloves from a corner kick he sank to his knees in self-reproach. For the home side it was the kind of night when emotion destroys clear thinking. But their passion was undimmed. With their all-yellow kit, Ukraine were a wheat field and England were the chaff. Yet the stubbornness of the English yeoman spirit kept them in the game somehow. Over the past five years regression has set in. There has been a steady weakening of their resources so that even qualifying campaigns now exert a terrible strain. Podgorica, for the Montenegro game, degenerated into a survival exercise. Warsaw was messy. Kiev was a matter of giving the ball away too often and getting away with it. Hodgson liked the result. The country hated the performance. And Wilshere now knows what England duty is really like.