Like most English football fans, I felt sick and despairing after seeing the national team succumb 3-2 to Croatia on Wednesday night. England have failed to qualify for the European championships next summer. It is an unprecedented disaster. Except, it isn’t. There are millions of precedents. In fact, if I didn’t take some sort of masochistic pleasure in disastrous defeats, I would have stopped watching England years ago.

Here, then, are my top six favourite English football disasters.
1) England 1 Poland 1, Wembley 1973. This game has all the elements that I now realise define an England disaster. It is a match we are expected to win easily against supposedly weaker opponents. Then things start to go wrong. The English goalie (Peter Shilton) makes a bizarre error and concedes a goal. Desperation spreads through the team. It is raining heavily, making it even harder for the players to retain their composure. Wild substitutions are made. By the end of the game, England have lost all shape to their play. The team are booed off the field. The television pundits can hardly speak. The manager is sacked.
2) World Cup semi-final 1990 – Germany beat us on penalties. Technically this is not a classic disaster, since England did well to get the semi-final at all. But I include it for the sake of symmetry, since the German goal involved a goalkeeping mistake by Peter Shilton, now 40-years-old and unable to jump, who is beaten by a cruelly spinning free kick from the Germans.
3) World Cup quarter-final 2002 , Brazil 2 England 1. Again, no disgrace to lose to Brazil. But the game did contain the usual weird goalkeeping error. David Seaman was lobbed from about 45 yards by Ronaldinho. This time England can’t even muster any fight for the last 30 minutes against 10 men. It’s hot, apparently.
4) Holland 2 England 0, 1993. The era when England was managed by Graham Taylor deserves its very own section. It culminated with failure to qualify for yet another World Cup finals. As ever, our best players were injured for a crucial game. We were denied a clear penalty. The Dutch were allowed to retake a free kick and scored. It was all very unfair.
5) England 0 Germany 1, 2000. A classic of its sort. A muddy Wembley; a goalkeeping error by Seaman. Bizarre team selection decisions, characteristic of a manager losing his mind under severe pressure. The manager, Kevin Keegan, resigns after the game.
6) Romania 3 England 2, Euro 2000. We are eliminated from a major competition by a “lesser team”. ”All we need is a draw”.... A tense night, we play terribly, but we’ve almost done it. Then Phil Neville gives away a penalty in the last minute and we’re out. Neville will never play for England again. Except he does.

Oh God, I can’t go on.

Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator and so he doesn’t really mind if England are beaten by a load of foreigners