A word on our sponsors: Carlsberg's team talk

Carlsberg's World Cup offering is a brilliant ad – if you think that most England fans are lobotomised baboons. Arguably, given responses to the ad on YouTube – "im shivering and nearly crying", "National fucking pride this is what we lack now a days", "fagot", "retard" – some actually are. But for everyone else Carlsberg's England team talk is just sentimental lunacy.

And what a long parade of it there is: Stuart "Psycho" Pearce, Trevor Brooking, Steve Redgrave (literally draped in the flag shouting "Do us proud!"), Kelly Holmes, Ellen MacArthur, Nigel Benn, Phil "the Power" Taylor (throwing a dart for no reason except to tell us who he is), a graffito of the late Bobby Robson... Then it really goes off the edge: some bloke breaking concrete with a flag, Carl Fogarty revving up a stationary motorbike, Jeff Stelling stripped to the waist and painted with a red crusader's cross, Ian Botham in chain mail, the ghost of Bobby Moore and … an Actual. Roaring. Lion. This overshoots patriotic cliche, screeches on through nationalism, and ends up somewhere in the latter stages of the Question of Sport Christmas party.

By ditching the ironically overblown premise of its "If Carlsberg made…" campaign and playing this ad straight, the makers have produced the advertising equivalent of the moment in Scarface when a coke-crazed Tony Montana decides to ditch the subtle approach and defeat an entire army with nothing but the largeness of his gun. Let's get all the celebrities, they said, let's make it a minute-and-half long, let's run it in the middle of the Cup final, let's invoke dead people that everybody liked! I'm only surprised they didn't remaster some old footage of Diana.

If vacuous bombast like this is going to conquer more than just the moron market, it needs a bit of mystery – the Guinness horses, for example. It also needs not to be for Danish beer. Because if Carlsberg did actually do team talks, surely the shouting would come from Hans Christian Andersen, Michael Laudrup, Niels Bohr, Sandi Toksvig, Lars von Trier, Whigfield and Søren Kierkegaard?

"We see this as an unique ad in that its target audience is just 11 men," says Paul Silburn of Saatchi & Saatchi, settling the question of whether or not he thinks we're stupid. "It's our ambition," he continues, "that the team will watch the ad and draw inspiration and motivation from it." If so, and our lads play like they're full of lager on 12 June, then we'll all know who to blame.

What they say: "Eleven English men against the rest of the world."

What it means: "If Carlsberg made … a complete prat of itself."