Is there anything weirder than the miserable story of the English football side? Why is the mother ship so useless at the world's biggest sport, given that it so dominates the game's international profile?
England has the most prominent premier league on the planet, and a fully professional system so deep it reaches names like Accrington Stanley and Morecambe. There's a vibrant media, fans who live for their clubs, famous stadiums, pots of money and - as the old line goes - pub teams who could beat the All Whites.
Yet many of their most famous club managers come from other countries, and they can't always find a national team boss from home either. The club teams are overly stacked with foreigners, and the England team looks more like leftovers than the main course.
When they get to the World Cup, there's every chance that teams from rocky outcrops will play better than the country we regard as the home of the game. England's specialty is cock-ups, like penalty shootout disasters and goalkeepers who play like they've been on the drink.
It's not just that England are out of this World Cup. It's the way they played that is so baffling because they've been like this for years and do nothing about it. When everything was on the line against Uruguay, they were hesitant, awkward, stilted, frightened, out of position. All the reasoning under the sun doesn't explain why they are so bad.
