ENGLAND’S defeat by Croatia on Wednesday evening was described by one breathlessly deranged pundit as a “holocaust”. I don’t wish to be complacent about the state of the national game, but I think this is rather overegging the pudding and also a little bit insensitive to the feelings of the people with whom we English shared third place in our qualifying group, Israel. After all, they know a holocaust when they see one - and a collection of overpaid, overindulged, ridiculously overpraised young men led by an overpaid hopeless incompetent predictably failing in a simple task does not to my mind fully constitute the term.

There must have been other committed and patriotic England fans who, like me, were howling with laughter from the seventh minute of the game onwards last Wednesday. Not out of spite, or vindictiveness - out of pure, unadorned, hilarity. According to Freud, the best jokes are those that simultaneously defy expectation and reveal a commonly acknowledged truth, by which criteria Wednesday’s game was a joke of world-beating proportions. Enormous things were expected of this golden generation; however, they’re s***, and it is a commonly accepted truth that we know they are.

At the press conference the morning after the night before, Brian Barwick and co sat with very serious faces, faces etched with misery; they summarily binned the hapless Steve McClaren and announced a “root and branch” investigation into the state of the national game. The one branch they won’t be sawing off though, of course, is the one upon which they were all dutifully perched, a convocation of blind sparrows. That particular branch, you can rest assured, is pretty safe. They will not be resigning, any more than McClaren felt obliged to resign: he had to be told, forcibly, to get lost. There is nobody to tell Barwick and co to get lost, except us, and we don’t count.

As it happened, the FA monkeys had a stroke of luck with the sheer magnitude of England’s spineless capitulation – it diverted press attention away from that other multiple FA debacle, Wembley stadium. How can it be that after all the agony and incompetence of getting the thing built, the national pitch resembled the sort of venue you see on porno internet sites where naked Ukrainian girls grapple in a farmyard with assorted cloven-hooved animals? And we had the cheek to complain about the Russians forcing us to play on a plastic pitch!

And why did the FA allow itself to be saddled with a contract for McClaren that allows him to walk away with £2.5m, having presided over the most dismal England performances in a quarter of a century, if not longer? Most of us, at the time, were 100% convinced that the appointment would end in tears - but the board of the FA cannot have been so deluded as to be 100% convinced it would end in success, can they? Didn’t someone ask, at some point, what happens if we don’t qualify and we have to ditch him? Oh, just bung him 2½ million quid. Nobody will notice.

This sounds harsh - and it is meant to. Because any supposed “root and branch” action to arrest the decline in the national game would begin with a bit of serious pollarding at Soho Square, with a shiny new chainsaw: you hold one end, I’ll hold the other. We have three serious counts on which the FA is bang to rights: the appointment of McClaren, the contract awarded to McClaren and the Wembley stadium debacle. And there is the ancillary charge, too, of having succeeded, last time the job became vacant, of estranging or offending every other decent managerial candidate, so that this time around anybody with a sense of self-esteem and an IQ higher than that of a crayfish won’t touch the job.

And that stuff is just for starters. Because, again, the wider malaise in our national game is also at least partly down to the FA, a consequence of its obsession with ensuring the virility of the Premier League and the financial well-being of our biggest clubs, to the occlusion of every other concern. It is not as if it hasn’t been told. People have been warning for years of the widening maw between the top division and those other 72 clubs, the ones English players play for. Alarmed at the dearth of English footballers in the top five or six teams, there have been repeated demands for a limit on the number of foreign players allowed in each side - and yet only now has the FA even contemplated doing something about it. Previous complaints were always brushed away with terse - and not entirely accurate - references to EU law, and with the admonishing riposte that foreign players have made the Premier League the “best league in the world”. Well, yes - the most watched, at least.

But at what cost? And it is no use offering up that other excuse - Italy have lots of foreign players in Serie A and it doesn’t seem to harm their national team”. Well, they don’t have quite so many foreign players, for a start. And in case it has escaped the FA’s attention somehow over these past 20 or 30 years - we ain’t Italy.

Most of the other problems, though - woeful training techniques from an early age, insufficient money for the smaller clubs to run successful scouting systems and youth academies - might be alleviated a little by the application of that one commodity which the FA possesses in abundance: money. Hell, call me Lenin, but if English football (as opposed to the Premier League) is to prosper, then the FA needs to be a little more redistributive with the moolah. The present economic imperative – let the devil take the hindmost - has not worked: the hindmost happens to be England.

It is the FA that needs reforming root and branch; it needs to properly understand its responsibility to the wider game, well beyond those bejewelled moppets of the Premier League. And it needs an administrator with a breadth of imagination, rather than simply a keen eye for the balance sheet.