England vs Iceland Euro 2016: Beware the minnows, for Three Lions record against smaller teams is terrible

England versus Iceland should not be a contest. It pitches the wealthiest football nation in the world against a country with the population of a Leicester, a Croydon or a Coventry, but when it comes to playing the minnows, nothing for England is ever entirely straightforward as these games demonstrate.

Having just lost their opening group game to Portugal, this was a match in which England had to win big. They didn’t win at all and by the 40th minute they were desperate not to lose. Ray Wilkins, a man with the temperament of an old-fashioned bank manager, had got himself sent off for throwing the ball at the referee. Bryan Robson did what he always seemed to do in World Cups and got himself badly injured, this time with a dislocated shoulder.

Had Morocco possessed more ambition, they might actually have won the game. The debacle led to a players’ revolt against Bobby Robson that saw Chris Waddle and Mark Hateley dropped and Peter Beardsley playing just behind Gary Lineker. The result was a 3-0 demolition of Poland.

When it comes to assessing Steve McClaren’s disastrous reign as England manager, everyone remembers the 3-2 defeat in the Wembley rain to Croatia with McClaren sheltering under that umbrella. In fact it was the goalless draw with Macedonia at Old Trafford that inflicted almost as much damage. Rio Ferdinand was injured in the warm-up, Gary Neville and Steven Gerrard hit the post and Macedonia defended with every man behind the ball.

McClaren and his assistant, Terry Venables, decided that radical measures were required for the next game against Croatia in Zagreb. That meant a 3-5-2 formation which Neville said was neither properly practised nor understood by the England players and a predictably disastrous defeat ensued.

As nadirs go, this would count as England’s worst display at a World Cup. As it coincided with the 70th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s “finest hour” speech, The Sun decided to mock up a front page with Wayne Rooney draped in the Union Jack. After a barren, directionless game in Cape Town that saw Rooney swear at the England supporters, The Sun’s headline the next day declared that: “Never in the field of human conflict has so little been offered by so few to so many.”

In the immediate aftermath of the game, an England supporter looking for the toilets wandered into the England dressing room where he gave his opinions on the game forcibly to a few players before being arrested. “We have spent a lot of money getting here,” shouted Joseph Pavlos. “What are you going to do about it?” The answer was: “Get humiliatingly knocked out by Germany in the next round.”

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The final group game began with thousands of England supporters flooding into Belo Horizonte just after their team had been knocked out of the World Cup. Roy Hodgson promised that by way of compensation England would at least put on a show against a Costa Rica side that had already qualified for the knockout stages. The show was not that different to the one they put on against Slovakia in St Etienne last week. It involved having an awful lot of possession and doing very little with it. At the final whistle which saw them finish with the lowest points total in their World Cup history, the England players went over to applaud their supporters, who booed them relentlessly.