England football performance dismal, is there another way to look at it?

Dismal, dire, pathetic and shameful, that's how I would describe England's performance last night. Once you extracted the expletives, the gist of what I was shouting at the screen was get Rooney off. When the cameras zoomed in on him he looked lost, scared and bereft of any fire or creativity.

Given the kicking this nation is giving itself at present I have sincerely hoped something spectacular from English football, maybe we could have shown the rest of Europe we were down but not out. It set me thinking about whether there is another way to look at English football.

English rugby and cricket teams hold their heads up against the rest of the world, we are doing pretty well at tennis, golf, cycling, equestrianism, canoeing, Moto GP, Formula One, in fact it's hard to think many sports in which English sportsmen and women are not winning medals and challenging on a go global stage. If that is the case, then why are we so poor at football?

I was in Singapore a while back and walking around we saw the bars crammed with people enjoying some sporting event. What quite shocked me as we got closer to realise it was Stoke City versus some other lower division team. The global interest in English football is undeniable, the problem is it increasingly involves fewer English players. The reason seems obvious, English premiership football has gone far beyond being a sport, it's just a business.

Unsurprising then that uber-rich overseas ‘business’ owners will make all the sensible commercial decisions necessary to enhance their wealth and that of their shareholders by buying the best talent from around the world. Which is easy when your pockets are that deep. Funny then that the Leicester City line-up seems to rely on home-grown talent.

For me, as someone intensely disinterested in football, the premiership is a statistical race, lose one week, win the next, but if on balance you do reasonably well then the silverware follows. From a player perspective the number and frequency of matches takes all the urgency and passion out of the game. Hence it is unsurprising that when faced with an entirely different version of football, one where players are asked to give their all, have spirit and passion and rise to the occasion, players like Rooney were completely lost.

I started shouting at the screen ‘get Rooney off’, and then started to feel rather sorry for him. He’s grown up in the bubble of premiership football and completely out of his depth, unable to either act nor look like the committed player and talent we needed on such an occasion.

I don’t see any solution to this problem, the genie is out of the lamp, premiership football is a massive business played out in the public spotlight. The opportunity to instil in its players the sort of passion and commitment exemplified by successful English rugby and cricket teams has passed. But I detest football so does it matter? What matters is the derision the rest of Europe must be feeling about the English as our team crashed out against a nation the size of Coventry.

Lets face that fact, football is not coming home anytime soon.