Premiership greed to blame for England's ineptitude

This may have been Sven Goran Eriksson's night of deepest embarrassment as a front-rank football man, but even if it is true that he cannot avoid the heaviest burden of responsibility, the buck surely is in need of wider distribution.

It should do a lot of travelling beyond last night's scene of immediate humiliation in the East End.

It should spread itself around the Premiership – the foreign-dominated, self-congratulatory outfit which, partly through its own folly, is having to re-negotiate the price of almost everything – and which owes its life to that old implausible fraud that it would produce a slimmer league and much more attention to the needs of a national team.

The lie was finally hunted down by Harry Kewell and his Aussie team-mates, who mocked England's development since Eriksson's night of extraordinary, but utterly misleading, triumph in Munich 18 months ago.

Australia's 3-1 victory came in their first international game since a failed bid to qualify for the World Cup against Uruguay 14 months ago. In that time Eriksson has led a World Cup campaign which ended in tactical poverty in Japan, two friendlies and two dismal European Championship qualifying games. The friendlies have now brought a meaningless draw against Portugal and a damning indictment against Australia.

Why is it that Eriksson feels able to inflict such a monstrosity of blanket selection and threadbare performance? Is it because he presumes only an idiot could not see that his hands are tied by the Premiership – that he cannot do what Sir Alf Ramsey did, supremely, and what Sir Bobby Robson and Terry Venables tried to copy, which was to operate on the fundamentals of all successful team sport? To fine tune. To shape a team which begins to know each other implicitly.

Ramsey laid down the blueprint of his World Cup triumph with a 2-0 victory in Madrid. It was supposed to be a friendly match but the Spanish coach said he had beaten by a team which had shown the potential to outstrip the world.

Last night the only thing England outstripped was the previous pace of their own slide into competitive irrelevance.

Eriksson can plead that he does not have the freedom to play real games with real, 90 minute teams outside World Cup and European Championship competition. But why does he so tamely submit to such nightmare restrictions? And why does he waste the time of his players and his public with the absurdity of last night's spectacle? Better to have a training camp shielded from the gaze of a mystified public than send potentially great young contenders like Wayne Rooney and Jermaine Jenas into last night's chaos. What could such tender talent make of Australia's 2-0 lead and easy ascendancy? Only what they managed, which was a decent fight of it, a flash or two of skill and a sense that there is talent in the land worthy of far better nurturing and protection.

No, it is not possible to paint the extravagantly rewarded Eriksson as simply a victim of oppressive circumstances. He is supposed to be the man to fight for his adopted team, but when does he raise his fist to the sky and say that the downgrading of international football in England has gone quite far enough? When does he really call it as it is – a scandal of greed and blinkered vision?

The bleak truth was laid bare on the ground that once housed the mature, world-beating talent of Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters. It said that England have become a bankrupt football nation in its lack of care and development of its best young talent. Last night that talent was thrown into the jaws of a bunch of Socceroos. Hopefully, it will survive the neglect that was so apparent after Kewell ran past Rio Ferdinand as though he was not there and then strolled the field – his work of destruction done with a degree of contempt that was, when you thought about it, entirely consistent with England's pathetic plight.

If there is pride left in English football, this simply cannot be allowed to go on.