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You could pick holes in the selection (as has been done); you can pick holes in the individual performances - but these are a function of the poor selections.

You can certainly also pick holes in the coaching: at one point the woman next to me asked "what formation are they playing?" - at one glance it was obvious - with the possession disputed in midfield the back four had pushed up into an inch-perfect line, the midfield four were also in a near perfect straight line, Defoe was malingering near the Czech box and Rooney, behind him, was zipping around trying to create options. I call that 4-4-2. Silly me. It now appears that Capello was trying to play "4-3-2-1", with Gerard as one of the two just in front of midfield. It's not only my amateur self who finds this flabbergasting; Portsmouth manager Harry Redknapp flayed Capello live on TV afterwards for playing Gerrard "on the left" - however Capello did not realise Gerrard had been effectively dropping back into a left-inside midfield role and was mystified. Possibly me and 'Arry had a better vantage point: we were miles from the pitch but looking down on it - Fabio is ten yards from it and buried in a dugout.

However, beyond all of this there is a really obvious problem and skipper John Terry summed it up:

"It's been a problem for the past four or five years and it's something we need to address as quickly as possible. I don't know what it is and, as a group, we are trying to put our fingers on it".

Now before you send this quote straight off to Private Eye's Colemanballs, just reverse the two sentences and it makes more sense. Former Liverpool player John Barnes summed it after the game: England have good players but they need intelligent players. He described a moment when Wes Brown, England's left back, lamped the ball upfield to roars of approval from the crowd. The crowd - ie the core of real fans who go regularly to league games - love the high-tempo, heavily physical, long-ball version of the game that is still played from local parks right up to the middle of the Premier League.

The problem is - as Sven and McLaren knew just as well as Capello - you cannot win at international level this way except by flukes and penalties after extra time. In theory there should be no problem, because at the very top of the Premier League the game is played differently: there is a focus on high skill as well as high-tempo and the successful teams all have relentlessly good midfields, flawless back fours and three or four attacking players, two of whom (in the nature of 4-42 or 4-3-2-1) have to play dual roles. They have a defined system and philosophy and the players have to fit into it: those that don't fit in get ruthlessly culled. Nobody dictates to Ferguson, Rafa or Scolari what their role is going to be. How different it is in the England camp.

So the first question for Lord David Triesman and everybody who works for him has to be: are England actually trying to replicate successful top-half Premiership football styles or not - and if not, what is the style and philosophy of play that England stands for. If the answer is yes, the next question is why is it failing so miserably?

I think the "thing" that Terry and co cannot put their fingers on was actually staring at them out of the centre-spread of the England match programme last night, in the shape of a heroic - nay, beautiful - photograph of Bobby Moore circa 1966. You can sum it up as leadership and poise.

What the England team exhibits is what managers in business are often called on to address - that is the inability of perfectly good "operations" people to step up to roles of leadership and strategy. There are entire multi-million pound consultancies devoted to taking business execs aside and systematically coaching them to be leaders, strategists, thinkers and to give them poise.

One thing Triesman should do is to urgently audit the leadership processes within the England team setup. He should insist that Capello himself has a senior mentor, that the key coaching staff understand this huge deficit that exists.

Poise and self-belief are two things that either develop together or corrode together. What I mean by poise is the ability to, at the peak of your physical and technical performance, also sit back onto an inner certainty about the strategy your are adopting, a confidence in your ability to handle everything, and simultaneously think ahead.
How do you learn it? I recently watched from close up a British opera singer give a performance of Haydn's Creation with perfect poise and confidence. I asked one of Britain's leading voice teachers afterwards - how does somebody achieve that? Answer: total connection between the inner and outer self, total mastery of technique to the point of relaxation; and probably quite a lot of Alexander technique. (And you might think this last point irrelevant but a really decent coach would be working on body shape and posture with about a third of the team on the pitch last night I reckon).

If you watch Obama, or Tony Blair at his peak in the late 1990s, it's the same thing. Or Nadal vs Federer. Or watch Bobby Moore ride out tackles and pick out team mates with graceful passes in the 1966 world cup archives. Even Gazza - heck even Beckham at the height of his powers - had that individual poise that is the basis of all team excellence.

What's happening in the England team is that lack of leadership is eating away at confidence; nobody knows what to do with the ball; when the chips are down players like Gerrard and Rooney charge around individually trying to replace brain with stamina. And neither Beckham nor Ferdinand nor Terry has seemed capable of steadying things from the on-pitch captain's position.

I don't see this as remedyless. Because in Beijing Britain's rowers, cyclists, runners and swimmers - who earn less than one tenth of what football players earn - have been expertly coached to the point where they ooze relaxation, poise and even genius, and are certainly able to out-think opponents strategically in real time.

Clearly one difference is time and power: Capello has nowhere near the time with players or power over them that he needs. Another is the way foreign players are edging English players out of positions where they can learn to compete at the highest level.
But I am beginning to think that for all the badges and certificates there might actually be something systemically wrong with English football coaching; that there certainly is something dysfunctional about everything to do with the England team.

Triesman, who now has untrammelled influence, should have Capello in for a talk this morning, should lay down strict performance objectives and a performance management programme; he should probably insist that Capello himself have some performance coaching or mentoring and that Terry also gets a leadership coach: probably unheard of in the world of million pound salaries, Lamborghinis and the Great John Street Hotel, but it's what would happen in any serious business.