Carsley is not the problem – something feels rotten at the core of this England

You can see it in the positional indiscipline, a habit that surfaced during Euro 2024, like a surreal episode of Oprah. Harry Kane, you get to be No 10! Jude Bellingham, you get to be No 10! Phil Foden, you get to be No 10!

FALL GUYS: England's Levi Colwill, Jordan Pickford and Declan Rice during the UEFA Nations League Group B2 match at Wembley Stadium, London. Picture date: Thursday October 10, 2024.

There is perhaps a certain bitter comic timing in the fact that England’s next opponent is the country serially ranked as the happiest on earth. Prosperous, equal, well-educated, socially supported and with few delusions of global grandeur, Finland offers our own disgruntled and perennially troubled nation an abundance of useful life lessons, most of which you can guarantee will go unheeded.

And so to Helsinki, where Lee Carsley apparently has just three games left to save the job that was apparently his after two games, slipping away after three games, and which he does not actually appear to want anyway. Perhaps it was inevitable, given our evident lack of enthusiasm for the Nations League format in general, that English football would use this autumn lacuna as an opportunity to turn entirely in upon itself, to give full rein to its rolling psychodrama, an extended Lee In/Lee Out referendum campaign.