Is it time to start to consider the position of England Manager Steve McClaren?

It wasn’t so much the defeat against a team that had lost three of its last four games (including one against Northern Ireland), it was the abject manner of it, with the team managing a grand total of one shot on target, from Michael Carrick.

Of course there were some excuses in the fact that England had lost players through injury, but Spain were hardly at full strength, starting without the likes of Torres and Joaquim, and were themselves very low on confidence, given their recent record.

McClaren had stated before the game that the result wasn’t as important as giving a good performance, but, instead, we got a bad result and a terrible performance. The Manager himself had, of course, changed his tune completely by then, quoting the absentees as an excuse.

Some of the team selections last night were as bizarre as anything Paul Merson had come up with at the Saddlers, with an utterly dreadful Shaun Wright-Phillips in the side, despite him having only started four games this season (and boy it showed), with Kieran Dyer disappearing for long periods (but he too has hardly played for months), with Peter Crouch making a pig’s ear of the lone striker role for hardly the first time and with Phil Neville, of all people, at left back. That was compounded when he bought on Gareth Barry at half time in midfield, as he had said beforehand that he didn’t want to play him at fullback, only to promptly move him there when he made more changes during the half.

The most bizarre decision of all was elsewhere, however. As Mark Lawrenson had said in the commentary, we’ve known that Gerrard and Lampard just don’t seem to be able to play together in the centre for months. Having experimented with Gerrard on the right wing, McClaren now decided to play Lampard down the left, where he was almost completely anonymous.

Lawrenson then went on to say that McClaren now needs to make a big decision about this pair and he is so right. John Motson then said that he agreed and that McClaren had already made one big decision by dropping Beckham from the squad. Trouble is, Motty, that was a dead easy decision for McClaren, as he was just trying to make a statement divorcing himself from Sven’s regime and it seems he is more bothered about his image than anything else. In the meantime, of course, with Lennon and Pennant out, we could have done with David playing, as we could the mysteriously absent James Milner.

McClaren said himself of the performance that it was better than the booing at the end suggested. He went on to say:

“Nobody is blind to the fact that we lacked quality in the final third — that final pass, that final cross and the final finish. That wins you matches. At times our approach play was good and patient — and the final ball let us down. And that’s key at any level of football.”

Of course, that begs the question, if that was the case, why didn’t he make changes there much, much earlier?

No, when Sven went, we were promised a bright new world. Let’s face it, we seem to worse now than we were under the much maligned Swede. Steve, you’ve given it a go, now hand it over to someone who knows what they are doing.