England’s manager, Steve McClaren, standing under his branded umbrella in the rain, watching his team lose to Croatia and fail to qualify for Euro 2008: already it is one of English soccer’s historic images. It recalls an earlier image, from 1993: Graham Taylor exclaiming, “Do I not like that!” during a campaign in which his England team failed to qualify for a World Cup. The bizarre phrase entered the language.

In short: anyone saying that England failed last month because the English Premier League is overrun by foreign players should recognise that English soccer has a constant, possibly eternal, problem: its lack of intelligence. The second problem is not that too few Englishmen play in the Premier League, but that too many do.