Win Euro 2008 for England!

Earning our place

Gaining the captaincy allows you to fiddle wholesale with the manager's tactics - here we've organised a far more exciting, attacking line-up, with us in our favoured Right Wing position.

McClaren doesn't seem impressed with our tactical meddlery.

Keep pushing on and scoring high ratings in each match to keep the manager's attention and make the full squad for competitive games.

Big-time friendly games are perfect showcases for your talent.

Our Wembley debut, and we bag a scintillating hat-trick. Don't get too attached to that armband, Terry.

Unless you impress, you'll quickly find yourself relegated to the long list of England has-beens.

Will he pick us? Does he even like us? McClaren looks on, disappointed as always. Miserable sod.

Scoring four goals in our first full competitive start can't do much harm to our England career, though. Cut-scenes like this show just how accepted we've become by the senior squad.

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.