One of the most surprising things for me is the belief that England's football team are in a huge and uncharacteristic slump, and that the players are a disgrace to the memory of 1966.

Those people forget that England have been excellent and poor in equal measure, with a horrifically barren period in the decade after they won the World Cup. In both 1974 and 1978, England failed to qualify for the World Cup, and today’s ruthless tabloid pack would have savaged those teams.

It is that frothy media frenzy – looking to inflate reputations, only to delight in seeing them pop when a journalistic needle is applied – that has scared the living daylights of some of England’s most accomplished players. Professionals like Frank Lampard have confessed that pulling on the England shirt – something that should be a source of heart pounding pride – actually elicits dread; it is glaringly obvious that the press have made the England squad mere ants, squirming away under the press magnifying glass, and always wary of being burned.

Don’t buy what the tabloids are selling, they are all too quick to criticise'


Another argument that is wheeled out to explain England’s failure is that the Premier League is so packed with foreign talent, that there is no breathing space for young Englishmen to progress. It’s illogical to imply that a lack of first-team opportunities for English players in the league has made England crap. Yes, there is a smaller pool of players for the manager to choose from, but there is a huge paradox here.

The World Cup was laughed off as a failure of the so-called ‘Golden Generation’.  The same core, when they failed to qualify for the Euro 2008 was derided as being too weak, and fundamentally that doesn’t make sense. The press have to make their minds up; are youngsters being squashed out – and if so – how could the ‘Golden Generation’ emerge?

In my opinion I think that one of the reasons that England didn’t qualify is because of a lack of common sense; appointing Steve McClaren was not a move away from the Sven-Goran Eriksson regime, but rather a continuation – albeit a far crappier one. The whole thing was rather like Gordon Brown taking over from Tony Blair; you feel like you have a similar, but less accomplished, person at the helm.

To toe the tabloid line and say that we can’t succeed – after unlikely victories from Greece and Denmark in the history of the European Championships - is sheer defeatism. So how do we escape the moany quagmire of press reports?

The answer is quite simple, don’t buy what the tabloids are selling, they are all too quick to criticise, and yet they leap on the tub-thumping nationalism by draping an England star in flag of St George and finding the most rousing passages – something from Henry V usually does the trick – to plaster across the back pages.