Paul Ince is a hopeless idiot and Roy Keane is a coward; Gabriel Agbonlahor, Theo Walcott and Ashley Young all make Lionel Messi look like Ade Akinbiyi. Robbie Keane, however, makes Akinbiyi look like Lionel Messi.

England will win the next World Cup and were prevented from winning the last one solely by a surfeit of waggery. And if you believe all that, you’ll believe anything. This last year in football has been characterised by epic delusions and short-term memory loss.

This last year in football has been characterised by epic delusions and short-term memory loss — sorry, did I already say that? There has never been a greater untruth in football than “you’re only as good as your last game”. If it were true then Craig Bellamy would be, week-in week-out, European Footballer of the Year or sitting on the bench for Barnet. And yet in 2008, never were judgments made on such brief and slender evidence. Gary Megson, a basket case in September, is now a genius. Soon, one suspects, he will be a basket case again. Kevin Keegan wasn’t the messiah, he was just a very naughty boy. Luiz Felipe Scolari, a tactical genius in September, is now apparently not merely unfit to clean the boots of Jose Mourinho, but unfit to clean the boots of Avram Grant. Gareth Southgate was the next manager of England in October and the next manager of Walsall right now.

We forget very quickly. Ince performed miracles at Macclesfield and MK Franchise; Keane was the best manager Sunderland have had since the lugubrious Bob Stokoe. Walcott scores a nice hat-trick against the smug Croats and we forget the many, many times when he has scored nothing and drifted, comatose and distrait, out of the game. Agbonlahor routed the Germans and suddenly he is the toast of English football and we forget that on occasions he has — as one former Millwall manager, rather tactlessly, put it to his hopeless centre-forward — the “touch of a rapist”. Aaron Lennon, in my opinion the best winger in British football since Ryan Giggs in his prime, was utterly forgotten and then equally suddenly rehabilitated.

You are not only as good as your last game, you are as good as your record over three or four years. Poor Micah Richards, once a certainty for the England back four, is now considered about as much use as Anne Frank’s drum kit.

This volatility, the snap judgments which at times bordered on schizophrenia, have made it a thoroughly entertaining year, mind. My happiest moment — aside from watching my team hammer Leeds United — came off the field of play, in an interview in a garden given by Steve McClaren to a Dutch journalist. You must have seen it. Straight out of the Austin Powers Goldmember movie.

I suppose it is not McClaren’s fault that he was a less appropriate manager of our national side than would be, say, Graham Norton and that we all knew that at the time he was appointed. But it helps that since his eviction we can still snigger at him from time to time.

Fabio Capello, meanwhile, has done a good job; but when we dream of Fat Frankie lifting high the World Cup after a triumphant final in South Africa against the Argies, we ought to remember those deeply unconvincing travails against Andorra, Belarus, Kazakhstan and France: the ghost of serial underachievement has not been entirely banished.

Nor yet the, er, poltergeist of consuming arrogance. Every time you start to believe England might actually win something, call to mind Ashley Cole’s bone idle and complacent back pass to a trundling Rio Ferdinand in the game against Borat’s men. They are still capable of that sort of stuff — and it is not a lack of ability which is to blame.

I enjoyed John Terry and Nicolas Anelka missing their penalties in the Champions League final, even though it meant Manchester United won. And I enjoyed watching United jet off to the other side of the world to win the Ninetendo Wii Greatest Club Ever Now That’s What I Call Football trophy against the likes of Sporting Khartoum Genocidalists and FC Islamabad Jihadis. Never again, Sir Alex, will you be allowed to complain about players being called up for international duty in a pointless friendly against the Turks and Caicos Islands. Never again will you be allowed to complain that there are just too many games in the season and the players are terribly tired.

There has also been much to be had from the continual assaults upon referees from the managers of the top four clubs. Especially Arsène Wenger’s almost perpetual whining and griping about every perceived injustice. That Respect campaign has worked a treat, hasn’t it? The odium heaped upon referees has, if anything, increased in volume this season. It is time for the refs to fight back with legal action.

But still, we all enjoyed the chutzpah of Hull City, even though it seems to be now draining away and you might bet on the three clubs who came up going straight back down at the end of the season, unless Gareth Southgate can work a little anti-magic. Or indeed, Tony Adams, bless him. The managers of the year so far, in the Premier League, have been Roy Hodgson, David Moyes and Martin O’Neill, which should remind all chairmen that there is no replacement for intelligence.