Phil Vickery leads his England squad out to France today determined not to be the captain that hands back the World Cup. No side has ever successfully defended the Webb Ellis Trophy but after a miserable four years England, now ranked seventh in the world, are listed as 33-1 outsiders.

Last month’s back-to-back defeats to France were a stark reminder to England of how much they must improve if they hope to mount a successful title defence. And England depart for France with their veteran No8 Lawrence Dallaglio’s comments ringing in their ears. Dallaglio, one of the stars of the successful 2003 campaign, and a member of the current squad, said England dwelled on victory for too long after being crowned world champions. In an interview to be aired tonight, Dallaglio said the preparation for this year’s World Cup has “only just started”.

“The planning process for this World Cup has only just started really,” said Dallaglio. “It should have started the day after the last one. But for two or three years after the World Cup we were still basking in the success of 2003.”

England departed on a British Airways flight from Heathrow, named ‘Hope and Glory’ specially for the occasion, and Vickery, another veteran of England’s 2003 campaign, remained bullish in spite of the team’s troubles. “I don’t want to be remembered as the captain who had to give the trophy back,” he said. “I can guarantee I will give 110% to keep hold of it.

“I am focused on playing for England and captaining my team. I will do that to the best of my ability. We must have no regrets. I hope no one in the squad looks back on the tournament with ‘if onlys’ or ‘could haves’ because it is too late then. We must give everything we have got and hopefully we can spring a few surprises. The France games proved the level we are at is not good enough. But we are not far away. We will go to France and give a good account of ourselves.”

England open their campaign against the United States in Lens this Saturday before tackling South Africa in Pool A’s pivotal encounter. “America this weekend will up their game because they are playing England and it will be a big game for us,” said Vickery. “We need to be mentally and physically right. The reality of it all is happening pretty fast now. There has been so much talk about the World Cup, but ultimately as a team you just want to get on with it. It is going to be intense but everyone is looking forward to it. We have all worked extremely hard and I’m really looking forward to the tournament.”

Former England coach Andy Robinson also backed England, saying he believed they would make the semi-finals, and perhaps go further. Robinson, who was sacked as coach last November after defeats in 13 of his 22 games in charge, said: “I think England will certainly get to the semi-finals. If they do they certainly have the one-off players to get to the final. I certainly think that New Zealand will be favourites and France look strong at the moment and you can never write off Australia, but I’ve got a feeling for England.”

Robinson also rejected Dallaglio’s claims about the team’s preparation. “I don’t think so,” Robinson said in response to Dallaglio’s comments. “I think the 2003 tournament was magnificent but I think once it was over everyone was focusing on 2007. There has to be a review of what’s happened over the last four years and I think that’s happening now anyway. The plans are being put in place to give England the best opportunity to prepare for the next four years.”

The cream-colored rancher at 19131 Garrison Ave. in Castro Valley sold in about 11 minutes on a Friday afternoon in late July. But unlike the boom days, there was no staging, no standing-room only tours and the multiple offers were of a far different sort.

Rather than the conventional “list and sell” method, the owner, who struggled to sell the house for about six months, let it go to the highest bidder. That bid came in at $450,000 - well below the mid-$500,000 asking price earlier this year, but above the $350,000 or so owed on the house, according to the auction company.

Weakening prices, a flood of homes on the market and the widening credit crunch are pushing many more sellers to unload their homes quickly through a method best known in the art and collectibles world. Buyers, facing a fast-changing market that has been so unaffordable for so long, are taking the leap and praying for a discount.

“Basically I drove up here … and 15 minutes later I owned a house,” said Dane Andrew, winning bidder of the Castro Valley house. “I think I did pretty well.”

Auctions of non-distressed properties come in several flavors - some require minimum bids and others do not. But they differ dramatically from foreclosure auctions because the homeowner, not the lender, makes the sale.

Including both non-distressed and foreclosure auctions, residential real estate auctions grew 12.6 percent in 2006, generating $16 billion, according to analysts at research firm Morpace International. Industry insiders say an increasing number of real estate agents are teaming up with auction companies.

No minimum bid

On the last Friday in July, about a half dozen representatives from Pacific Auction Exchange milled around the three-bedroom Castro Valley house. The Bakersfield company, which has expanded in the Bay Area with several franchises, was offering the property through an “absolute auction,” meaning there was no minimum bid. The highest bidder got the house.

As the clock ticked past 1:10, nearly 30 attendees shaded their eyes from the hot sun in the backyard. Most were neighbors or real estate agents, but eight or so had brought along a cashier’s check for $15,000 in order to qualify as bidders.

Thomas Hightower, broker and owner of Hightower Properties in Vallejo, a relatively young Pacific Auction Exchange franchise, read out the terms of the sale and introduced the auctioneer, Bryn Mercado. After an opening bid of $100,000, the auction moved quickly, up through the $250,000 mark, to $350,000 and then to $430,000, where the action stalled.

“We’re going to have a new owner today, folks. What’s it going to be?” Mercado said, adding that $10,000 more would translate into only a few more dollars per month on a 30-year loan. Finally, the bidding died down to two: Andrew and a Bay Area woman who was on vacation in Colorado and bidding by phone. (Pacific Auction Exchange officials identified the bidder and gave her name and number to The Chronicle. She did not return several phone calls.)

At $450,000, the auctioneer called the sale and Andrew prevailed. While the crowd clapped, he embraced his girlfriend, Danville real estate agent Arlene Cristobal.

A few minutes later, a handful of auction employees, decked out in shirts with company logos, packed up the sound equipment, took down balloons and a blue open-sided tent, and Andrew stood in the kitchen signing sale documents. Pacific Auction Exchange charges a 10 percent buyers’ premium on its properties - meaning the total sale price was $495,000. Andrew’s deposit had to total 10 percent of the sale price; so in addition to the $15,000 cashier’s check, he had to write a check for $34,500. (The sale has not been finalized, but escrow is expected to close this month.)

Despite the hefty check, Andrew was remarkably cheery - handing out his business cards showing “Rascal,” his Chinese Crested dog that has been voted the World’s Ugliest Dog and frequently makes guest appearances on “The View” talk show and in movies.

“Yes, the market could go down,” said Andrew of Sunnyvale. “But you just have to go for it and take a gamble sometimes.”

Real estate auctions appeal to buyers because they hope to land a decent discount - Andrew speculated that he had saved in the tens of thousands.

But absolute auctions in particular can be incredibly risky for sellers, despite the benefit of the rapid-fire sale. Although the owner of the Castro Valley house did not respond to requests for an interview, public records show the home was last purchased in spring 2006 for $455,000 - $5,000 more than what he will receive from Andrew. For that reason, most sellers tend toward auctions with a reserve (in which the lowest acceptable bid is not disclosed), or with a hard and fast minimum bid, according to Steve Good, author of “Churches, Jails and Gold Mines: Mega-Deals from a Real Estate Maverick” and chief executive of Chicago’s Sheldon Good and Co., one of the largest real estate auction firms in the country.

Good said sellers typically fall into four categories: those who can’t handle the ongoing costs of the home, those stuck between two houses, sellers facing some kind of financial reversal such as a job loss and those in bankruptcy.

In contrast to other housing downturns, “people leveraged to the hilt,” said Jim Leiman senior vice president of Morpace, a Farmington Hills, Mich. research firm. “They are in a somewhat more desperate situation because of the easy financing we had. People are in deeper trouble.”

Even those sellers who choose to set certain price parameters find obstacles. Jain Wager has just relisted a historic Berkeley hills home for $3.65 million. She and a business partner purchased the house in 2005 for $1.23 million and put more than $1 million into renovating it. But after trying to sell the house for $5 million earlier this year, Wager attempted to “try to create some excitement and try something unique” by auctioning it with a starting bid of $2.249 million. Wager also reserved the right to accept or reject any offer.

Wager said she received a strong bid in the “round robin” style phone auction, but the deal fell out of escrow.

“I think we came out of the gate a little high (on price), and it would have been better to lower it and have people bring it up to the market,” Wager said. “I don’t know if this system works for luxury homes or not. I think the jury is still out on that.”

Santa Rosa auction

Centennial Homes, the developer of the Chanate Village townhome project in Santa Rosa, hopes the process works for new homes. The company is working with Beverly Hills’ Kennedy Wilson Auction group to sell off 22 new townhouses late this month. Some of the properties have minimum bids of $200,000 below the seller’s original asking price. The builder is willing to take the price cut in order to get the homes off the books.

“It’s a great marketing tool we’ve discovered and it’s a way to move your product faster,” said Centennial Homes division President Jim Clifford. “Now that I’m more educated on it, I might even use it in the good times.”

Owners of the 11 other homes in the development may not be happy with the lowered prices, but Kennedy Wilson President Rhett Winchell notes that empty townhomes lingering on the market for another year would be even more harmful to property values.

Winchell said his firm was one of only a few operating in the state for the last five years or so. But in the downturn, dozens of real estate auction companies are cropping up as more buyers cruise the Web for deals on homes that might have been out of reach just months ago. Morpace’s Leiman, who just returned from the National Auctioneers Association convention in San Diego, said more real estate agents are hooking up with auction companies and vice versa.

“It’s a cyclical business,” Winchell said. “You see a lot of conventional brokers coming in looking for another way to make money. The problem is many of them don’t have a lot of experience. The people who know what they’re doing will continue in this cycle, and the ones who don’t will fail.”

Andrew, the Castro Valley winner, hopes to translate any discount he received into quick cash. He plans on putting the Garrison Avenue house on the market almost as soon as escrow closes. But he doesn’t plan on using an auction.

“I think we could do better on our own,” Andrew said.

E-mail Kelly Zito at kzito@sfchronicle.com.

NEWARK: Passengers are understandably angry when they are stuck on a delayed flight. But they should not necessarily be surprised Д especially those traveling on flights like American Airlines 1659, departing every afternoon from Newark Liberty International Airport to Chicago.

Flight 1659 is the most chronically delayed of all flights on a full-size jet operated by a major domestic airline in the United States. It arrived at OHare Airport at least 15 minutes late 84 percent of the time during a 12-month period ended in June.

And when Flight 1659 was late, it was really late Д an average of 87 minutes behind schedule, or roughly the time it takes for the American MD-80 to actually fly the route.

Bob Cordes, a vice president for planning at American, a unit of the AMR Corporation, has at his disposal a formidable array of tools to try to make the airlines fleet of 668 big jets run on time, including advanced scheduling software.

But he often feels powerless to remedy persistently late flights. For Flight 1659, Cordes said, he has even sought outside help: “We went to church and lit a few candles.”

In all, more than 100 domestic flights are officially late Д by at least 15 minutes Д 70 percent or more of the time. And most of those arrive, on average, more than an hour later than scheduled, the Transportation Department found in an analysis of a year of flights. (A full years data smoothes out the effect of seasonal miseries caused by summer thunderstorms and winter snow.)

“It is such an unbelievable mess out there,” said Cheryl Geib, who, as corporate travel manager for the Grant Thornton accounting firm, arranges trips for hundreds of workers and then listens to many of them complain about delays.

But the worst flights still draw plenty of passengers. Why? For many, the air travel system is in such disarray Д planes stranded for eight hours on a snowy tarmac, flights canceled when pilots do not show up Д that it might be foolhardy to try to guess where trouble lurks.

“Theres no way Im hanging myself out to dry by pointing out late flights,” Geib said, adding dryly that the flight chosen as a smarter alternative would no doubt end up late.

Fliers might expect some short-term relief, as a summer marked by widespread flight cancellations and delays, and the most crowded planes in the history of jet travel, comes to an end.

But the long-term outlook is not good, and travelers should brace themselves for a growing number of chronically late planes, grim clones of Flight 1659.

The reasons include an overtaxed air traffic control system that is probably at least a decade away from being replaced, and a handful of big hub airports that at times are operating above their practical capacity.

Airlines, to save money, compressed their schedules in recent years Д often planning departures with 30 minutes or less on the ground between flights. That makes it next to impossible to catch up for the day, once a plane hopping from city to city falls behind.

Newark Airport has more than half of the chronically late flights. Its operations are particularly vulnerable to weather problems, said Leo Prusak, the New York district manager for the Federal Aviation Administration, who also oversees Kennedy and La Guardia airports.

American Flight 1659 is scheduled to take off at 5:55 p.m., the busiest time of the day, just as a long line of overseas flights leaves Newark and dozens of regional jets prepare to carry connecting passengers to smaller cities.

Continental Airlines and its regional jet operator, ExpressJet, account for most of the flights at Newark. And ExpressJet, operating there under Continentals name, has more than one-third of the chronically late flights on the Transportation Departments list.

American, with a smaller presence at Newark, suffers along, as do many of its passengers. On June 20, Flight 1659, scheduled to land in Chicago at 7:35 p.m., did not deliver its bleary-eyed passengers until 1:31 a.m., according to FlightAware, a company that tracks flight performance.

Travel experts repeatedly urge fliers to book trips in the morning to minimize the risk of delays. But for many people, Flight 1659 offers the promise of convenience, at least in theory.

Kerman Ali and Kinya Jett, chose Flight 1659 on Wednesday because they were able to spend most of the last day of their honeymoon in New York wandering around Times Square before heading to the airport. They were relatively lucky Д the plane pushed back from the gate 37 minutes late, but made up some time in the air, arriving only 19 minutes late.