James Lawton: We have seen enough - the FA must end McClaren's wretched regime now

In the aftermath of another witless performance by England, another lurch towards the possibility of failing to qualify for the European Championship finals - and losing revenue estimated at around £50m - the Football Association now face just two calls. One is on their judgement. The other is on their nerve.

If the two are aligned to any coherent degree there can be only one consequence. It is the sacking of head coach Steve McClaren and the admission that the only difference between their appointment of him and his predecessor Sven Goran Eriksson is that it has taken just seven months, rather than five years, to be confirmed as a disaster.

The appointment was born of desperation and bankruptcy, and executed in embarrassing confusion after "Big Phil" Scolari turned the FA down last year, and nothing that has happened since has allayed the fears of those who saw in such as Martin O'Neill and Guus Hiddink infinitely stronger candidates.

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Now we see the result: an England team drawn from allegedly the best and wealthiest league in all of world football who cannot conjure a single goal in their last three qualifying matches against a roll call of second and third division international opposition; Macedonia, Croatia and Israel.

Surely even the FA has seen enough to know that their one alternative to firing McClaren - a blindfolded belief that somehow the "magic" engendered by a flurry of games at Wembley will carry England past a Croatia who are already slipping over the horizon and a Russia who are, inevitably, continuing to improve under the shrewd stewardship of Hiddink - is nothing more than the most desperate occupation of the saloon of chance and speculation.

This, though, is what all past evidence suggests will be the course of FA inaction. When Eriksson was left paralysed in the face of the challenge of applying pressure to a 10-man Brazil in the World Cup quarter-final of 2002 - when England had their best chance of lifting the title in 37 years - his fate for many hard judges should have been sealed.

However, instead, Eriksson blundered on to similar failures in the European Championship of 2004 and last summer's World Cup. Four years of what had been described as a "golden generation", was thrown away by a man who had proved himself incapable of building a national team.

Now, under his successor, the remnants of the golden generation are looking like a care-worn collection of the overrated and the under-achieving. When a few of them raised their arms in the old ritual thanks to fans who had been unprecedently subdued for most of the night, their reward was a chorus of catcalls. It was not the least sadness of the night that the players looked as miserable as the fans.

Plainly, they are without leadership - almost even a point of existence as international players.

In the old Ramat Gan stadium, all of McClaren's attempts to confuse public relations with action and substance fell away to leave him in a state of professional bankruptcy. How else can you describe his return to the most wretched of the football mantras, that results are always more important than performance; that it doesn't matter how you play as long as you qualify?

Though even this minimum achievement for a major football nation is now in serious doubt, McClaren insisted the main thing was that you qualified. But qualified for what? Another walk-on part on the big stage, another early folding of the tents, another abject failure to realise potential? And then how to measure the progress of any team if there is no standard, no graph?

The truth was impossible to varnish at the Ramat Gan. England lost qualifying ground to the victorious Croatians and Russians against an Israeli team who for 20 minutes showed a little dash, a little skill, and then all but lay down and died.

They were sustained mostly by the shrewd defensive brain of Bolton's Tal Ben Haim, who a week earlier had been engulfed by the re-emerging power of Wayne Rooney. Here on Saturday, Rooney, now 21 years old, was back playing Kevin, Harry Enfield's incorrigible teenager, and might easily have been sent off. His play was so dead, so untouched by the qualities of brimming brilliance that persuaded so many acute observers that he was indeed potentially a player of the ages, but at least in this respect McClaren's responsibility can be rated no more than marginal. Sir Alex Ferguson, after all, has had only fleeting success in lifting what seems to be an unshakeable descent into professional misery.

However, elsewhere England's performance was a terrible reflection on McClaren's failure to ignite the team. Before Israel lost their way so profoundly, West Ham's Yossi Benayoun conducted a brief seminar on the value of a creative midfielder. He passed the ball sweetly and produced staggering evidence that it is possible to turn defence into attack with one flash of intuition. By comparison, England's midfield was a production line working so glumly it was though they had been denied piece rates. Frank Lampard's instinct to get forward might have brought a couple of goals but when he has an England shirt on his back his trigger finger promptly goes into hibernation. Steven Gerrard was visible enough at times, most brilliantly when he delivered a perfect one-touch ball to the feet of Lampard, but mostly it was another example of his inability to inflict his talent on an international game in any sustained way.

Aaron Lennon might, as some suggested, have done better on his favoured right side, but if he started brightly his light was all but extinguished by half-time.

Long after the cupboard had been revealed to be bare of sustenance, McClaren threw on Jermain Defoe and Stewart Downing. Defoe was thwarted when a sharp chance fell to him, Downing crossed a couple of times, but Ben Haim generally had enough time to split his duties between defence and the winding up of Rooney.

McClaren said that his players had done everything but score. He could not fault their effort. So the bankruptcy was official and irredeemable, except perhaps for a change of leadership.

Where would the FA go now? Terry Venables, whose handiwork in recent games has been invisible if it existed at all, may still have the potential to be more than a competent caretaker. He knows football, he knows the yearnings and the frustrations of players, and why some of them seem to turn their backs, irreversibly, on the best of their talent.

One clear benefit of his elevation in an emergency situation would be that the agenda would once again be based on the practicalities of football achievement and not some endless, and frankly embarrassing, attempt to draw attention away from the central issue of whether the national coach has won the respect and conviction of his players.

McClaren has toured the country talking to his players. He has sent them DVDs so that they could study their failures and "stay angry". At one point he even hired the celebrity publicist Max Clifford. It is no good. England are dwindling not growing. They do not need gimmickry or PR. They need judgement and nerve - at every level of the operation.