Plane home: Roy Hodgson will suffer again in Brazil unless he makes changes

Jones can step in and out of the defensive line in the manner of  Marcel Desailly or Brazil’s Gilberto Silva (he’s nowhere near either yet, but he’s young.) To steer him in this direction, however, requires evolution of thought.

Look at the way Barcelona use Javier Mascherano. Sometimes a midfielder, sometimes a centre half. That would never happen with England, because of his size. We like our defenders tall and our midfielders hard running, and we always seem so sweetly shocked when our opponents come up with alternatives. How do they do it? Well, for a start they don’t ‘do’ anything.

First they think: then they do.

It is not true that English footballers are inferior technically. Such a fault would have to be genetic, and that is not possible. English  footballers end up inferior due to a paucity of thought.

Rio Ferdinand was as good a footballer as the player he so admired, Matthias Sammer of Germany, but was never seriously encouraged to play as a sweeper or screening midfielder, so became a one-dimensional player, while  Sammer was three-dimensional. It was not ability that separated them, but ideas.

Terry is an excellent footballer. He has a range of passing with both feet, his  positional sense is outstanding and he reads the game well. All the attributes required for defensive midfield: except from a very early age nobody thought, even for a  second, that he might play there.

Eriksson tried Ledley King holding once, in a friendly with  Argentina, and because he looked a little startled by the unchecked movement of Hernan Crespo,  Carlos Tevez, Juan Roman Riquelme, Maxi Rodriguez and Esteban Cambiasso, the experiment was abandoned after 56 minutes, never to return.

So far, under Hodgson, Jones has the hallmarks of another casualty, condemned to be second-reserve centre half and third-reserve right back, when his promise suggests he is capable of more. The inquest into England’s exit from the European Championship is being celebrated for its maturity. Aren’t we grown-up, not demanding the manager’s head on a stick because we lost a game of football? Yet, equally, there is nothing mature in accepting  inferiority. Certainly when ideas then get boiled down to handy buzz- words like ‘youth’ or ‘revolution’.

We now invest our faith in Jack Wilshere, a young man whose injury bulletins grow more unsettling and mysterious with the passing of time. If he is fit to face Italy on August 15, it will be his first serious game of football since June 4, 2011.

What manner of England team will be played that day? Will we still attempt to smother a midfield three with two? If so, what does it matter? Our players may be young, but if our thinking is old, this revolution will be anything but live.

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