IF you'd have said in 1966 that England's national football team would have a foreign manager you'd have been strung up.

What has happened in the intervening 34 years to make English football chiefs pick an overseas coach and the English press and public accept it with barely a wimper?

The answer can be found in Frank Skinner's 'Football's Coming Home' song:

Thirty years of hurt!

We've won nothing since 1966 so all of a sudden we have lost the will to go it alone.

The English have become spineless, they can't take defeat. That's the message we are giving the soccer world by turning to Swedes, Italians and Frenchmen.

The country's hardly a bed of roses but we wouldn't want a foreign prime minister just like we would never stand for the importing of a monarch -and, let's face it, there are probably more people interested in football than either politics or the monarchy.

The state of our national team is an English problem and it is up to us to solve it.

Just imagine England winning the World Cup and the lasting image being of a German chaired shoulder high by the players and holding the Jules Rimet Trophy aloft.

The FA's historic decision to offer the job to Swede Sven Goran Eriksson means such a scenario is now possible. While telling reporters about the move for Eriksson, the Football's Association David Davies said that the FA were working on training up young English coaches for the future, with the emphasis on the word 'English'.

So if it is so important to have an English coach in the future and it was so important to have an English coach in the past, why isn't it important to have an English coach now?

And what makes the FA believe that a foreigner can do any better than an Englishman? They say foreign managers are more successful than English managers but I bet they can't name one foreigner who has earned that success by using English players.

Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal have all benefited from having foreign managers but who do all three look to to wear the shirts? The answer is foreign players and that is one luxury a foreign England national coach will not have.