So England’s hopes of qualifying for a major international tournament look in as much doubt as it has done since defeats away to Norway and Holland in 1993 left England almost without hope of qualifying for USA ’94.

But is it really any surprise? Well no not really. This was always a tougher grouper than so called experts/rent-a-quotes would have you believe. Not quite on the level Scotland had to deal with but certainly tougher in terms of strength in depth than anything Eriksson had to deal with before. But this is not an anti-Eriksson rant, far from it.

I had been one of the earliest detractors of Eriksson’s reign of England. He was a man who’d had a decent record in club management in Sweden and Portugal and yet had managed to win Serie A just once on the back of a crippling amount of Lazio money and with some help from big bottlers Inter Milan throwing the title away on the last day of the season.

I thought Eriksson’s best England performance was a friendly v Mexico when for once the football was properly flowing between Scholes, Gerrard, Beckham, Fowler and Owen. I thought the Germany 5-1 victory was wildly overrated and just the perfect deployment of the sit back, ride some luck and hit on the break with fast forwards. People loved Eriksson at the time of 2002 qualification. He’d got England back from a poor start in the group. I wasn’t so enamoured, particularly with his tactical showings and also his love of ‘star’ players.

Obviously as we now know that was the peak of things. Slowly the nation fell out of love with the Swede, but as I often do, I look against the grain of ‘popular’ opinion. And what I found was that I had been wrong all along. I, much to my remorse and embarrassment, had been swept along a bit into believing the England players were better than they actually are. That it was Eriksson that was to blame for England’s insipid, boring, safe first, long ball, no importance placed on possession, football. I’d always known that even when England played Georgia or Serbia that those nations looked far more comfortable with the ball at their feet but I felt Eriksson only accentuated these traits.

Again, how wrong I was.

Towards the end of his England reign I began to realise that this wasn’t a shortcoming in his abilities as a tactician nor his care for the job (though he did still love his ‘special players) but that he’d realised the only way to get maximum success from the England team was to play in a rigid, defence first, direct manner. He knew the players were over-hyped. He knew the players were limited in their tactical knowledge, adaptability and brains. And I began thinking that getting England to three successive quarter finals was a real success.

Of course the tabloid and much of the broadsheet press just couldn’t take the fact that this so called ‘golden generation’ was precisely not. If anything it was fake diamond earrings. The broken glass generation if you will. The Elizabeth Duke generation.

And yet still, here we are again, only this time the disappointment is England haven’t qualified for a major tournament, not knocked out of the world cup. Whose to blame? McClaren and the EU they’ll probably say. Those nasty Europeans imposing all these foreign players on our Premiership.

It isn’t. It’s over-hyped, overpaid players and continuing poor football education from young which generates impact players of great physical nature but with little ability to properly think about the game. And of course the awful fawning media who feed this problem.

There isn’t one World Class player in the England team. There are a lot of good impact players who come and go during a match but none who can properly dominate and run things the way Riquelme did for Argentina at the weekend despite not breaking out into sweat. Or the way Elano does for Brazil and now Man City. Interestingly with regards to Elano and the ever decreasing quality of the broadsheet media in particular; Henry Winter the Telegraph’s chief football correspondent was asked on Soccer Supplement (Sunday’s on Sky Sports) about the comments Eriksson had made after Man City had taken apart a largely British West Ham team on the first day of the season. The City manager had fielded a team containing quite a few new summer foreign purchases and was asked the typical idiot English sports journalist question as to why he hadn’t got his England team’s to play with the same style, swagger and controlling dominance that revolved around Elano controlling things in the hole. His quick response was that ‘England didn’t have an Elano!’

Before he even opened his mouth I knew what Winter was going to say. So predictable this pathetic blindness and bizarre ignorance that once respected pundits like even Alan Hansen has to this generation of players. Incidentally, after the Russia v England game Hansen was saying how magnificently all the England players had done, all of them, Cambell, Lescott etc…

What? Lescott looked totally out of his depth and England played the tried and trusted ball forward as quick as possible routine that never wins anything internationally. Because England were not able to close out the game and put their foot on the ball Russia were able to get a head of steam.

Anyway, back to Winter, he could hardly get his words out and his face was one of utter contempt. To paraphrase, he said ‘Absolute rubbish - what about Wayne Rooney?…’ and that’s all I needed to hear, perfectly summing up everything to do with the current state of the English game. England’s most hyped player who is a great impact player, often against inferior opposition, was being compared to the Brazilian who marshals a game and whose skill sets are almost complete opposites of Rooney’s as two attackers can be. And yet here was a so called football expert suggesting Rooney could play like a Bergkamp or Riquelme. Not only are English players stupid when it comes to analysing footballers but so are many of the commentators of the game. Celebrity and fawning over the star players rule. Don’t criticise because you might not win the deal to co-write one of the players bore-fest autobiographies!

English football probably needs a wake up call. Because a lot of the England squad look good next to their foreign club counter-parts and because a lot of them look good on highlight reels it is assume they are all World Class internationals. They aren’t and they haven’t proven it. And yet we keep getting scapegoats left and right but anywhere other than the fact that the players, actually, aren’t very good.