I work in a room with perhaps 150 Britons. Some are Welsh. Some are Scottish. Some are Irish.

But most seem to be English … and they are in pain.

While American soccer fans are understandably nervous (two draws?) and upset (the disallowed goal) … their anxiety is as nothing compared to that of fans of the Three Lions.

You know, England. Masters of the game, and all.

Not that they had high expectations or anything, but …

One of my colleagues did a story for the Sunday newspaper here in which he recounted the headline that appeared in The Sun newspaper of London in December, the morning after the World Cup draw was announced:

“England, Algeria, Slovenia, Yanks = EASY”

In fact, English soccer fans (led by their own media) immediately inspected the draw, penciled themselves in for “champions of Group C” … decided they were on the easy half of the bracket … and then had their team speeding through the knockout phase all the way to the semifinals … where they probably would get Germany. Hmm. The Germans might be a problem. This, they conceded.

If you want a couple of dozen examples of English overconfidence, a commodity that glutted the soccer world market until, oh, a week ago … mosey over to my countdownSA-2010 blog and do a search for “fat-headed English” or “Three Lions counting chickens before they hatch.” Then settle in for hours of reading.

England not only had the cart before the horse, they had a rank of London taxies, a double-decker bus and the whole of the London Underground lined up before the horse.

They had been seduced (and this is a recurring theme in English soccer) by a nifty European qualifying run in a group that they preferred to think was strong when, turns out, it wasn’t. Mopping up Andorra at Wembley isn’t quite the same as the Germans in the Coupe du Monde.

Their overconfidence was particularly startling in that it has been a pathology that grips the country every four years since 1966 — which happens to be the one and only time England won the World Cup. When it was played in its own country, by the way.

Since then, England has failed to qualify three times and reached the semifinals only once, in 1990. Four times it has gone out in the quarterfinals, and twice in what amounted to the final 16.

And every time, English fans believed, right up until their team straggled home, that they were destined to win the whole shootin’ match.

It’s really quite odd.

Of late, the confidence seems to stem from the high caliber of the English Premier League, the best in the world (unless it’s La Liga, in Spain), but the big fly in that ointment is the predominance of foreign-born players in the Premiership. One would think England could round up 11 guys who could play at a high level for one month in the World Cup … but history has shown you would be wrong.

Now, England has that freakish tie with the Yanks, and an embarrassing scoreless draw with Algeria on Friday night that had English fans in Cape Town booing their own team as the lads trudged off the pitch, having failed to score against one of the weaker sides in the 2010 World Cup.

The English in the newsroom … are variously angry, embarrassed and depressed. “This always happens!” one muttered the other day. Other dark imprecations were uttered by Englishmen who gathered in front of the big flat screen TV down here in the sports department to watch the Algeria game. I thought they were mostly stewing … but someone who was sitting closer to the crowd said there were muttered curses and insults.

England probably needs to defeat Slovenia on Friday to get to the second round. Which wasn’t how it was supposed to work, back when The Sun was writing the EASY headline. But there you are. Again.

Speculation about opponents leading up to the semifinals has, mercifully, come to a halt, and a certain Chicago Cubs-like fatalism has set in … which is the healthy approach to this.

Still, we are talking about the nation that was the world’s premier superpower a century ago, the one that (along with France) essentially invented or codified scads of sports and came up with the whole idea of “physical education” and recreational sports … reduced to pinning almost its entire sports enthusiasm on a single (soccer) team … one that fails to deliver. Again and again.

My fellow Americans … we can’t even know the trouble the English have seen. “Hard times” for us in sports are winning more Olympic medals than China but finishing behind them in gold. We expect little or nothing from our own soccer team, and a big chunk of the nation remains blissfully ignorant of its very existence … so whatever the Yanks do on Friday — advance, retreat, go home — we will not be scarred.

But in England … that giddiness of December is about to turn into the dejection of June, and I can’t help but feel bad for the blokes. Even if they all have seen this movie before — about 10 times.