Tarnish finally shows on the faux ‘Golden Generation’

MANAGER sacked at the end of a brutal campaign? Check. Critics charge that he was woefully inept and inexperienced and should never have been installed in the first place? Check. Players accused of being prima donnas who don’t perform like the national shirt means anything to them? Check. Outraged fans flood phonelines and websites to demand that blazers’ heads roll too? Check. Roy Keane puts the boot in? Check.

Haven’t missed anything there, have I? Apart, obviously, from the small matter of the name Steve and, while we’re in the realms of eerie déjà vu, the fact that the eponymous international gaffers finally met their doom at the hands of a country whose name begins with the letter ‘c’.

The moral of the story is obvious. The footballing destinies of Ireland and England are now so intertwined and even interchangeable that, short of the much longed-for political union between our two great nations, it appears our best hope of qualifying for a major tournament is if we agree to mount a joint bid to host one, either in 2028 or when a rail link to Dublin Airport is finally opened, whichever comes first.

A problem shared is a problem halved, so they say, although that doesn’t fully explain why a lot of football fans on this side of the water felt about 50% better after seeing England follow Ireland through the Euro trapdoor at Wembley on Wednesday night. This columnist has long argued that such deep-rooted schadenfreude has nothing to with 800 years of bondage and everything to do with 30 years of Jimmy Hill. The bould Jimmy may now be over his surname but his spiritual heirs are still at it, popping up in TV studios and hyping the English football ‘product’ out of recognition.

Even Alan Hansen, who should know better, delivered another quivering hostage to fortune ahead of the Croatia game.

“I’m going to stick my neck out,” he told Gary Lineker, who at least had the good grace to look a mite nervous, “and say that England will win tonight — and win comfortably.”

As the man says: ye cannae win anything with punditry like that.

Speaking of hostages, is it just me or did McClaren’s farewell press conference remind anyone of a kidnap victim finally seeing the light of day after a long period in captivity? Looking drawn and blinking in the glare of the flash bulbs, the sight of him in civvies after months in an FA shellsuit was part of the effect, but the real giveaway was the fact he spoke about how honoured he’d been and how he understood the decision the FA had to make.

Psychologists would have instantly recognised this as a classic example of the Stockholm Syndrome, the phenomenon whereby a hostage comes to identify with his captors.

The only difference is the released captive isn’t usually berated by the media for failing to escape, which is more or less what happened to McClaren on Thursday. Here was a man who’d just been sacked for failing spectacularly at his job, and the nearest he got to sympathy was a bellicose hack bawling: “Why didn’t you resign, Steve?”

“I never walk away from anything,” McClaren proudly replied, neglecting to add that, paradoxically, it is much easier to do the walking away if your pockets are weighed down with four million squids or thereabouts.

What is proving much harder, even with the filthy lucre on offer, is getting people to walk in. Martin O’Neill, José Mourinho and Sam Allardyce have all moved quickly to narrow the field for the England selectors, and who can blame them?

The concept of the poisoned chalice hardly does justice to the stained beaker of toxic cold soup which appears the international manager’s lot, especially if his job spec is to restore “the home of football” to its exalted position on the map of world football. (Which was less than 20 years after the war, in case you’ve forgotten).

Doubtless installing a suitably experienced and influential figure would help, but what is dawning on the “Mr X must go” crowd is maybe, just maybe, the world’s most hyped players are not all they’re cracked up to be.

Having failed to set the World Cup alight in Germany last year, the “Golden Generation” now won’t even get the chance to throw another damp squib into the mix in Austria and Switzerland next summer.

So just how good is England’s gold, really? Not up to the best or even the middling best in Europe, if recent campaigns are anything to go by. While much was rightly made of the alarming lack of urgency to England’s play on Wednesday, the real story was about how comfortable on the ball each and every Croatian player looked in comparison to his English counterpart. And this is nothing new. The English domestic game may have come on in leaps and bounds but, with a few outstanding exceptions, its most technically-gifted practitioners still tend to be of foreign extraction.

Limiting their input isn’t the solution. Learning from them is, starting at the base of the pyramid and working to the top. And what goes for poor old Blighty also goes for poor old us.