That was the worst thing that ever happened to England in ODI cricket. It was the first time they started selecting bits and pieces county all-rounders and supposedly specialist one day domestic cricketers instead of players of proven class. Although it succeeded in that tournament it's been down hill ever since.
The biggest problem has been the number of times people have tried to claim the team has "moved away" from bits-and-pieces players - FFS, they were saying this in 2002 because they'd dropped Mark Ealham (a proven excellent one-day bowler) and were then picking the likes of Jeremy Snape.
In essence, though, bits-and-pieces players are not the main problem. Yes, the likes of Matthew Fleming, Dougie Brown, Neil Smith and Adam Hollioake himself were never going to be ODI-class cricketers (or Vince Wells, selected shortly afterwards), but nor were specialists selected around the same time like Graham Lloyd, Chris Silverwood and Alastair Brown. Picking bad specialists has been every bit as much of a problem as picking useless bits-and-pieces cricketers.
I mean, I always go from WC99. Virtually all the players who've debuted or almost debuted (having played 3 or 4 games previously) since then had zero chance of becoming ODI-class cricketers:
Mark Alleyne - played the odd extraordinary innings and was always someone I liked but never had anywhere near the consistency required.
Andrew Flintoff - was hopeless for years before finally becoming pretty good in 2001/02, then very good a year later.
Chris Read - debuted before he was much good and in recent years since he has become good his past failures have haunted him.
Vikram Solanki - hopeless.
Graeme Swann - hopeless when first picked, looking decent 8 years later.
Marcus Trescothick - excellent player but gone now.
Paul Franks - hopeless.
Paul Grayson - shudder. How on Earth did he get anywhere near selection?
Michael Vaughan - hopeless in the shorter game, clogged the team up for 7 years due to being a good Test player and the fact that half this country can't tell the difference between the game-forms.
Paul Collingwood - hopeless for ages, been a bit better recently.
Owais Shah - hopeless in his first two spells, a bit less than hopeless in his most recent one, but overall picked for the wrong form of the game.
James Foster - never anywhere near as good a one-day batsman as Read.
Matthew Hoggard - Vaughan with the ball.
James Kirtley - hopeless.
Jeremy Snape - possibly the worst player ever to play ODIs for England, until Tim Bresnan.
Ryan Sidebottom - shouldn't have been picked when he was, back now hopefully for a while.
Alex Tudor - hopeless in the one-day game.
Ian Blackwell - useless.
Gareth Batty - hopeless.
James Anderson - never been that good despite not irregularly having much better figures than his bowling merited.
Stephen Harmison - hopeless, except in the summers of 2004 and 2005 when he was surprisingly good.
Rikki Clake - picked for the wrong form of the game.
Anthony McGrath - poor.
Jamie Troughton - picked for the wrong form of the game.
Richard Johnson - sure enough, decent performances... and promptly dropped for crap bowlers. Played 5 serious ODIs, all in 2003 and 2003/04, and had an economy-rate of 4.29-an-over (average 48.66) but didn't get another game.
Robert Key - picked for the wrong form of the game.
Kabir Ali - picked for the wrong form of the game.
Andrew Strauss - picked for the wrong form of the game.
Geraint Jones - picked for the wrong form of the game, after being picked for the right one admittedly, but still should not have replaced Read.
Sajid Mahmood - hopeless.
Alex Wharf - hopeless.
Ian Bell - never that good yet in ODIs either as an opener or three.
Kevin Pietersen - excellent.
Simon Jones - no great crack in his whole 5 ODIs so far, and a dubious selection ITFP.
Matthew Prior - hopeless, especially inexplicable when picked as a specialist batsman.
Jonathan Lewis - not bad, but never given a fair crack and now too old for WC2011.
Chris Tremlett - still hopeless so far, despite a good spell most recently.
Liam Plunkett - hopeless.
Glen Chapple - 1 game against Ireland, doesn't deserve to be a ODI.
Jamie Dalrymple - not really given a particularly fair crack, but let's face it, he was never going to be a World-beater anyway.
Ed Joyce - mostly picked completely out of position, and not surprisingly failed.
Tim Bresnan - currently the worst player ever to play ODIs for England.
Alex Loudon - batsman picked to bowl fingerspin. Enough said.
Alastair Cook - still yet to really look the part at ODI cricket, not terribly surprisingly.
Stuart Broad - beginning to.
Michael Yardy - hopeless, and wrong form of the game.
Paul Nixon - excellent job as a stopgap measure but no more and was never going to be.
Monty Panesar - picked for the wrong form of the game, after being picked for the right one admittedly.
Mal Loye - worth a try, but didn't come off, and now too old and out-of-nick this year anyway.
Ravinder Bopara - still to convince.
Dimitri Mascarenhas - not given a fair crack of the whip yet.
Luke Wright - hopeless.
Philip Mustard - hopeless.
Tim Ambrose - not yet done much, only really had 1 serious innings so far though.
Which all in all, is not very encouraging, and still there's evidence little has changed.