'We need to cast our net further for England manager... how about Uranus?'

'But is he a patriot?' England need to cast their net further in search for a winning manager.

Bringing in a foreign manager to control the destiny of our national team can only end in disaster.

They just don’t know the psyche of the players, the fans or the subtleties of what it means to be English. They really don’t understand that we like losing. Bleedin’ love it, in fact.

By putting a German in charge of the men’s national football team that time-honoured tradition of being the whipping boys is seriously under threat.

That robust and fair-minded folded paper oblong of common sense the Daily Mail (quelle surprise) led the chorus of disapproval at German Thomas Tuchel’s appointment.

At this point, I have to admit, I haven’t read the Daily Mail’s meltdown. It may well have made some valid points about why it was, as they put it in their headline ‘A Dark Day For England’, to put a German in charge of the national team. Except, I reckon they probably didn’t. I will read it, eventually, but to do it now, I just know I’ll come away feeling dirty.

I’ll save it for when Tuchel is taking his open-topped bus tour of London holding the World Cup aloft, dressed, I trust, in full leather lederhosen, clunking a foaming porcelain stein with the rest of the triumphant England players.

Surely Tuchel was the best available and certainly more accustomed to success than any of the English front-runners. I mean, he’s won the Champions League, French Ligue 1, and Bundesliga in recent years. Eddie Howe and Graham Potter between them can boast, erm, the Svenska Cupen (I think it’s the Swedish FA Cup).

We just aren’t destined to win anything. We had our day back in 1966, and even then we were incredibly lucky. We had home advantage, a favourable linesman (there's no way that vital leading goal crossed the line) and we had the perfect opposition little West Germany. England would never have beaten the whole of Germany.

I fear even casting the net overseas to find the winning formula isn’t far enough. We may have to go into outer space. An alien England manager! What would the Daily Mail’s sports writer Jeff Powell say about that? Perhaps he should play a part in that interplanetary selection process.

We can but ask: ‘Hey Jeff, you’ve got a lot to say about England managers, how about you pull one out of Uranus!’

Worth a shot…