Why the system, not Hodgson, is to blame for England’s problems

One of Roy Hodgson's favourite writers, Stefan Sweig, killed himself in Petropolis, a town near Rio in 1942 despairing of where European civilisation and culture was headed. Now what has happened to Hodgson in Brazil does not bear any comparison with what Sweig was going through as the fight with Nazism raged in Europe with no definite indication that this evil could be defeated.

Those of us who write about sport often use absurd, theatrical, language particularly when treating a sporting defeat as a national disaster. We are not the only ones. In Brazil the defeat at the hands of Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup led to a term called Marcanazo. It represents the hurt from this unexpected football defeat and is so deeply felt that the country has never forgotten what happened in that match. Endless books and films have been made about the 1950 match.