Forget Sam Allardyce, the man for our times – you might as well appoint the Toilet Duck as England manager

The endless debate over England’s footballing failures is like an elongated version of the haiku. Cleaving to that poetic form’s 17 syllables, this is my take: England’s always been bloody useless at international football

Incoming England manager Sam Allardyce (Getty)

The white flag will be adopted as the footballing banner of England on Monday, when Sam Allardyce is officially introduced as the national team’s latest mismanager. While you won’t literally see it, embossed with three mangy and toothless lions, fluttering in the Wembley breeze, the flag of surrender should be plainly visible in the mind’s eye. With this appointment, the FA abandons the ancient fantasy in which it confuses England with a genuine contender for international titles.

The point to choosing Allardyce – a braggartly dullard who mistakes his coma-inducing competence for scandalously overlooked genius – is not to challenge for trophies. The only imaginable purpose to hiring him is to avoid future humiliation on the Icelandic template.

For some 20 years, “Big Sam” has bored beyond endurance with tactics of such lethal dullness that at West Ham United, the home crowd booed him even when their team was winning. When finally he left Upton Park by “mutual consent”, his Croat successor Slaven Bilic transformed the squad into the scintillating team which last season came so close to a Champions League finish.

Had Allardyce’s limitations needed any illuminating, it took Bilic about five minutes to focus the halogen spotlight them upon them.

Why the FA didn’t approach an outstanding foreign coach like Bilic is not entirely clear. Perhaps the blazers remain too traumatised by the conclusions to the tenures of Sven Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello to countenance another foreigner. On the other hand, recalling the triumphant denouements to the stints of Steve McClaren and Roy Hodgson, who could blame for them for sticking with native talent?

Yet, as the roster of abysmal failure outlined above suggests, the identity of the incumbent coach could scarcely matter less. For all the influence any England manager has on any tournament outcome, the FA might as well have hired Bruce Forsyth, Pippa Middelton, Mr Miyagi from Karate Kid, reported plagiarist and First Lady wannabe Melania Trump, popular TV advertising icon Toilet Duck, the late Ena Sharples or Trumpton firefighter Barney McGrew

If you think that’s a load of hyperbolics, consider this: since 1950, when it belatedly deigned to make its tournament debut, England has not beaten a major power - Brazil, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Argentina, the Netherlands, Uruguay, Spain or Portugal - in a World Cup or European Championship knock-out match on foreign soil. Never. NOT. ONCE.

From that brutal fact, can anyone discern the stirrings of a pattern? Over 66 years, with the sole exception of that flukey home advantage success in 1966, and regardless of the coach, England has either been humiliated by a minnow (USA in 1950, Iceland a few weeks ago) or blundered through the draw until falling to the first powerful opponent it met.

The causes of this catalogue of inadequacy are the subject of fierce debate each and every couple of years, when the post-tournament debacle phone-ins vibrate to squeals of anguished introspection.

I say “fierce debate”, though considering how similar the blethering is – “pampered prima donnas”, “no passion”, “tactically naïve” – this is much closer to an elongated footballing version of the haiku. Cleaving to that poetic form’s 17 syllables, this is my take: England’s always been bloody useless at international football.

The explanation is more complicated than the analysis. One could spend eons examining why incomparably better coaches than Allardyce have failed, and why the England shirt reduces gifted performers such as Wayne Rooney, Harry Kane, David Beckham, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard, and so on to pastiches of hungover Sunday morning park players. But that’s one for a PhD thesis.

All we can do in the space available is reiterate that the identity of an England coach is meaningless. (The same goes for the players, by the way. Against Iceland, you might as well have taken 23 men selected at random from the National Insurance computer, introduced them to one another five minutes before kick-off, and sent them out with tactical instructions conveyed in ancient Babylonian.)

On this basis, Allardyce – with his concentration on set pieces and long ball drudgery drawn from Graham Taylor’s early 1980s Watford playbook – is a timely choice. With England having voted in the EU referendum to turn the clock back decades, behold football’s laureate of the retrograde.

A man whose defining mixture of brazen arrogance and brittle insecurity perfectly mirrors that of an England supportership, which labours along the twin tracks of a) a sense of entitlement, born in 1966, that England belong among the tournament favourites by divine right, and b) the defeatist certainty, lurking an inch below the cocky facade, that England will exit the tournament ignominiously.

Thin-skinned and chippy, Allardyce is plagued by the tragicomic faith that nothing other than his Midlands bulldog persona prevents him being acknowledged as a tactical grandmaster on a par with Pep Guardiola, Guus Hiddink and others of the football world’s sharpest minds.

If you hoped Slaven Bilic put that misapprehension to bed at Upton Park, then you understand nothing. As the suitably abysmal appointment of Sam Allardyce tacitly acknowledges, when was any hope ever realised in the context of the England football team?