In Paris on Monday evening they laughed as England slipped quietly out of Euro 2016.
Crowded outside bars opposite Gare du Nord, they laughed as the tiny TV sets showed England falling behind to Iceland. Later, they stood with hands clasped to astonished faces as Roy Hodgson’s team inched closer to calamity.
It was a peculiar soundtrack to an embarrassing evening.
In France they expected to be facing England at Stade de France on Sunday, just one stop up the track on Line B. They, like us, probably should have known better.
In football there is failure and then there is England-style failure. Nobody here is laughing at Spain, for example. Spain lost to Italy. It happens. England lost to Iceland. That isn’t supposed to happen.
So they laugh here at English incompetence and then they look at the Premier League and the superiority complex attached to it and wonder why a domestic competition that makes so many bold claims can produce so little on the fields of international football.
That is the pertinent question and it is one that we should ask, too. Why does a league that contains so much that is good consistently produce an England team that is so wretchedly and consistently bad?
Summer tournaments provide platforms for footballers; platforms for joy, expression and great achievement. By all these parameters England have been failing for years.
Some other nations — this time Wales, Italy and Iceland — take the opportunity to pull together, find strength in common purpose and feed off the adrenaline to play above themselves.
This never happens to England. For years England’s default tournament option has been emotional lockdown. Our players stagger through summers like zombies, unrecognisable from the ones who play well at club level.
There is no fun, no expression and no sense of great optimism. The result? There is no football.
For Wales, Gareth Bale arrived in France ready to make his mark and he took the fight to England in Group B. That wasn’t to everybody’s liking but Wales are still in the tournament, driven forwards by Bale and his clear desperation to be remembered. Where was England’s Gareth Bale? Goalkeeper Joe Hart did plenty of shouting in the tunnel before matches but couldn’t back it up on the field. Like many of his England team-mates, he has had a dreadful three weeks.
Yesterday morning back in England, the managerial jungle drums started.
Some of our game’s most experienced and knowledgeable coaches called each other to dissect this disaster. It’s what football people do on dark days like this.
Many understandably blame Roy Hodgson. They feel he was over- promoted. There is little love for Dan Ashworth, the FA’s director of elite performance, while some feel appointing Gareth Southgate as Hodgson’s successor would be a mistake. Inside the game, many feel Sam Allardyce may now be a shrewd appointment.
Changing the coach has to help. Whether it will be enough to change a mindset, enough to coax players out of ingrained summer habits, is another thing entirely.
This malaise is not something that began with Hodgson. England have been stuck in a cycle of chronic under-achievement going back years, back through a succession line that includes Fabio Capello, Steve McClaren, Sven Goran Eriksson and Kevin Keegan.
All these managers were different, as people and as coaches. But all suffered the same problem. None of them can claim to have produced an England team whose whole was ever greater than the sum of its parts.
The last truly memorable England performance? Germany 1 England 5 in September 2001.
So all roads lead back to the same question. What happens to these players when they leave their club to join up with England?
We have talked about a winter break before and it’s a pertinent part of the discussion. Over the past decade or so, many of our players have arrived at World Cups and European Championships on their knees.
Discussions about that will continue between the FA and the Premier League into next season but will be of little immediate help to whoever replaces Hodgson.
England’s new coach will have to break the mould on his own. He has to short-circuit a cycle of apprehension that has enslaved so many English players. In many ways, bringing about that psychological change will be more important than the players he picks or the tactics he uses.
Monday night in Nice was perhaps the worst it has ever been. No wonder the French were laughing.
More to the point, who among us would really have had the confidence to approach that group outside the station on Monday night and tell them that in two years’ time in Russia everything would be different? – Daily Mail