England in disarray: So who's to blame?

The players? The manager? Sven? England's latest footballing disaster has plunged the national team to new depths. Sam Wallace looks for the culprits

McClaren's predecessor, Sven Goran Eriksson, showed little interest in developing players

At the end of next week, Steve McClaren was due to take a plane to an American city on the western seaboard for a coaching masterclass with Mike Holmgren, one of American football's greatest coaches. A smart idea from the more proactive elements in the Football Association to boost the profile of a man who has proved a difficult sell to the public - and one abandoned yesterday in the wake of defeat to Croatia.

Had it been the City of Angels or the City That Never Sleeps, the headline writers would not have been given such an easy target, but McClaren was headed for Seattle, which occupies a very particular place in the public imagination. Sleepless in Seattle? You bet, after Wednesday night. Clueless in Seattle? What seemed like a good idea last week became a no-win option for an embattled England football manager.

The Seattle trip was to push McClaren's image as an innovative coach who was ready to learn - yesterday it was cancelled as the manager went into retreat. It was not his FA handlers' fault that it came to sit in his appointments diary with all the appeal of a wake. English football is heading for another bout of painful self-examination, but there was no desire to make it even more absurd by setting it in the birthplace of the late king of self-loathing, Kurt Cobain.

So who is to blame for the state of the national team? And the plunging self- esteem brought on by Saturday's draw at home to Macedonia and Wednesday's guileless defeat in Zagreb to Croatia?

STEVE McCLAREN

In his first serious tactical test, McClaren and his assistant, Terry Venables, were completely outmanoeuvred by the rookie Croatia manager, Slaven Bilic. "It is not right to look at the formation," John Terry said, "the performance was not there tonight, let alone the formation. All week we were comfortable with playing that system." That may be the case, but Bilic beat them with the simple ploy of pressuring England's wing-backs with the excellent wingers Milan Rapaic and Niko Kranjcar.

What happens now? The next few days will be brutal for McClaren; there may well even be calls for him to be removed. It is a personal opinion that down that route lies madness, that a football nation which gives its manager five games before deciding he is inadequate is doomed. The England manager's job has already accumulated a painfully heavy burden of expectation that is handed down as an inheritance to each incumbent like a crippling family debt. To add the misery of short-termism to that package would be to take away the last element of sanity from the job.

THE PLAYERS

"It is not nice to hear the fans shouting. They have travelled a long way and deserve their opinion. It is still not nice, even though at the same time we lost and deserve a lot of things we get." That was John Terry on the England performance that seems to have seriously fractured the players' relationship with the fans who follow them everywhere on an endless tide of optimism: the abuse that rained down upon the squad as they boarded the bus on Wednesday was unprecedented.

There are plenty of angry old arguments about complacent millionaires and indulged Premiership stars - that misses the point. England's first XI is a fragile shell and without Steven Gerrard, Michael Owen, Owen Hargreaves and Joe Cole there is precious little cover. Michael Carrick's timidity means that he has squandered a fabulous chance to impress. Scott Parker is certainly not Hargreaves' natural replacement. Gary Neville is not a wing-back. They seem unable to keep possession in any advanced positions. It used to be nights like these, like the victory in Poland two years ago, that they thrived in adversity.

SVEN GORAN ERIKSSON

Five years of misrule cannot be undone in five games, as McClaren is only beginning to find out. It seems now that it will take an enormous cultural shift from Eriksson's exaltation of the individual over the team to reshape England. For years he too experimented with different systems, only to bequeath McClaren a side that could not master anything but 4-4-2.

Eriksson left no legacy other than a secure route to qualification for three major tournaments - and he certainly showed little interest in the wider problem of developing players beyond those who were immediately relevant to his team. Wednesday night suggested that the so-called golden generation does not simply need fine-tuning, the result of the Eriksson years is the necessity of a complete rebuilding programme.

THE FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION

There are plenty of people under the age of 50 at the FA who care about the England team and work hard to protect the integrity of the 143-year-old institution. And then there are some who seem unaccountable for anything that happens, and nowhere more than right at the very top.

It may seem unimaginative at times like this to blame the whole establishment but one man in the FA certainly deserves it. He is the chairman, Geoff Thompson, who has reigned serenely since 1999 and seldom takes an ounce of responsibility for anything. How can one man preside over so many failures and scandals and keep his job? With the support of the old boys from the shires among the FA's councillors.

So will McClaren get a public vote of confidence from the man who sits above even the chief executive, Brian Barwick? Don't count on it, Thompson endures by never giving an opinion. In his match-day programme notes for the Greece friendly in August, Thompson managed to avoid any mention of the staggering failure in Germany just a month earlier. Unlike the many managers and chief execs, he is a survivor at all costs.

THE PRODUCTION LINE OF ENGLISH TALENT

There is a memorial on the wall of the Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb to the Croatian fans who died in the war for independence little more than a decade earlier. It hints at a staggering truth about the nation. Players like the brilliant, influential Luka Modric, just 21, who ran the midfield on Wednesday, are war babies, footballers who learnt to play in a country that was caught in a devastating conflict.

How can it be that Croatia, a nation of just 4.4 million souls, can produce such talent in such unpromising circumstances? The English academy system is around eight years old, but already there are grumblings of discontent that the top clubs are finding it easier to fill their youth teams with foreign footballers. The Premier League says it is too early to judge academies and is carrying out a review under Richard Lewis, who is a youth development expert from - wait for it - rugby league. You have to hope he gets it right, because England will struggle to endure many more nights like Wednesday.