The Third Leader: England expects

Some changes in society are dramatic. The communications explosion, the loss of empire and industry, the currently remembered death of Diana, Princess of Wales, which showed us to be as emotional as the next nation. And, of course, as remarkable, but far less explicable: our goalkeepers.

Once, England keepers were as a rock. Artists of the unfussy who thought a salmon-like save the result of a positional error, or being foreign. Nabokov, himself no slouch between the sticks, considered them terribly dull, but they were formidable networkers.

And now? An ageing, endangered species. Producers of palpitations. Custodians of confusion. Flamboyant furnishers of fiasco. Did you see the one at Wembley? Even more remarkably, the best keeper in Britain is... Scottish.

It's a puzzle that would tax even Arthur Conan Doyle, who used to mind for Portsmouth. Some trace it to the selection of a goalkeeper with a pony tail. Some go further back, to the choice of one with an Italian name, Peter "The Cat" Bonetti. Others go for a combination of Diana, Margaret Thatcher, climate change, education, the service economy and bad eyesight.

What's to be done? Well, in the long-term, we must look to our settlers from Poland, producer of some splendid onion-bag patrollers, including the one who kept us out of the 1974 World Cup finals, and the late Pope. In the short-term, I see that "The Cat" still turns out occasionally.

And there is this consolation for Messrs McClaren and Robinson from another distinguished shot stopper, Albert Camus: "The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth." Yours!