Actually, the introspection part is just wishful thinking on my part. Far more likely: hand wringing, gnashing of teeth, finger pointing, talk of reform, grass roots etc., but in 4 years time and again, to a lesser degree, in 4 years, we’ll almost certainly repeat the same cycle.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. All fueled by the feckless tabloid media playing to the lowest common denominator and its readership lapping it up.

We English have a disease. It’s a disease of living on past glories, with scant recognition of the realities around us, and the vain belief that any shortcomings can be resolved in short measure, without any great understanding of what those shortcomings are. Come Brazil in 2014, we’ll doubtless be talking about “48 years of hurt”, but still not a damned tangible action put in place to correct the long term direction of English football.

It’s a disease of ignorance.

Many Villa fans are far from immune to this disease at club level and are still living in 1982, labouring under the misapprehension that throwing countless millions at the transfer market is all that needs to be done to catch up with likes of Man Utd.

Ignorance.

There are countless blogs and forums out there which do little more than attach themselves to the tabloid media like leaches, echoing the baseless speculation, pontificating on which they think might be credible and which are rubbish based on nothing more than what they wish to be true or false. They add absolutely nothing original, nothing insightful, nothing thoughtful. And the readers lap it up. That’s what they want. News of the screws and WAGs of course. Lots of WAGs.

Ignorance.

But there is some light at the end of the tunnel, a growing movement of sorts. Fantastic football writers do exist, both in the mainstream and within the blogosphere and they’re increasingly finding new ways to get their message out. Thankfully, the level of TV punditry has received a chorus of criticism during this tournament. This Scotsman article has been picked up frequently and is a fantastic example of calling out the broadcasters’ mind blowing level of arrogance at their own ineptness, but is by no means the only example:-

The Beeb got carpeted by some viewers for their treatment of that Algeria game. So what happened before the kick-off in yesterday’s lunch-time match between New Zealand and Slovakia? In a six-and-a-half minute introduction just one player out of the 22 on show was given a name-check, and here is how it happened.

Lee Dixon: “Slovakia have got some decent players, Hamsik, the pick of them. Young player, plays on the left side.”

Gary Lineker: “He’s at Napoli.”

Lee Dixon: “That’s right.”

Alan Hansen (chuckling): “Somebody gave you him, by the way.”

What Hansen meant, I think, was that his colleagues must have been fed the Hamsik reference by another party, that they couldn’t have come up with his name all by themselves. It’s not like Dixon or Lineker produced a dossier of facts about Hamsik, a file of information on who he is and where he has been. All they did was mention his name and the fact that he was rather good. That was it. Hansen seemed to think this was worthy of a gently-mocking put-down, as if the other two were some kind of class swots. As such, he was almost revelling in his own ignorance.

This is just a perfect example of the level of ignorance that permeates the English game at every level. These “experts” are nothing of the sort and the audience is deemed so clueless that they can literally be laughed at, right in their faces. Unless this kind of lazy, second rate punditry is rejected as unacceptable, as insulting to its audience, they will turn out to be quite right to laugh at us. Laughing all the way to the bank as it happens.

Is this the sole reason for England’s abject failure? No, of course not, it’s not even the root cause, but until we recognise that as a nation, we’re just not that good, how can we hope to fix it? How can we recognise that we’re not as good as other countries if every 4 years we whip ourselves into a frenzy with the false belief that we’ll beat the other teams based on absolutely nothing more than blind faith and the “knowledge” that the Premiership is “the best league in the world”?

Innit?

Unsurprisingly, I’ve already read knee jerk reactionary rubbish that we’ve all read time and again in response to the latest England disappointment. There are too many foreigners in the Premier League stymieing the development of English youth. Foreign management. Too much money. Yada, yada, yada.

I’m sorry, those are symptoms of the problem, not the cause. Attacking those issues is tantamount to sticking a plaster over a deep gash. What we need to do is understand what is fundamentally wrong with our game at a technical level and realise that fixing it won’t happen in time for Brazil 2014.

Or 2018.

The cream will always rise to the top and when we seek to develop and reward strong coaching and management skills, we’ll get the English managers we deserve. Similarly, when we foster technical skills and an understanding of the game among our youth, we’ll get the players we deserve. You reap what you sow. The fact is, top English players tend to cost more than their foreign counterparts in the transfer market because there are less of them. It’s the simple economics of supply and demand.

Symptoms and cause. Create an army of strong, technically proficient youngsters, tutored by strong, technically proficient coaches and you’ll flood the market with cheap talent, and the best will get their chance, making foreigners superfluous. Attack the problem from the other end, by introducing limits on the number of foreigners in the league, forcing the inclusion of substandard domestic players and all you do is dilute the overall quality of the league. How on earth that is supposed to help the national team, I can’t possibly fathom.

So, the key for me, as with many things in life, is education. We need to put a massive emphasis on equipping our coaches and managers with the skills and knowledge they need to develop quality young players. (If I see another club asking for special permission to put an unqualified ex-player in charge of coaching the team, I think my head will explode, I don’t care how popular they are). We need to educate those players with the technical skills they need to perform at the top level and, this is arguably the most important element, we need to educate ourselves about the global game. We need to reject shoddy punditry and journalism and promote quality.

We vote with our wallets. As long as we purchase tabloid garbage, they’ll keep producing it. As long as we dress their rumours and speculation up as news and argue about it on blogs and in forums, they’ll keep producing it. As long as we subscribe to the uninformed, jingoistic flag waving, we’ll keep believing that we’ll win the next World Cup. As long as we accept the TV companies wheeling out know-nothing “McExperts”, we’ll swallow their hackneyed, cliched rubbish.

As Mahatma Gandhi said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world”. Indeed. Until we truly recognise what the real problems are, and that we are all part of those problems and, equally, can be part of the solution, we’re doomed to repeat our failures.

Over and over and over and over and…

Time to wake up. The solution is not going to be quick. It’s not going to be easy either.

One final thought: England wheeled in one of the tournament’s oldest squads, a “golden generation” apparently, full of expectation. By contrast, the Germans brought one of the youngest, but, crucially, expectation was low and it’s understood that the national team are currently in a period of transition. I look outside of our “golden generation” and I’m not really sure who the next Gerrard or Lampard is. The thought that the next Messi, or even Özil, could be English is simply ludicrous.

And even if he did exist, who’s going to coach him? Alan Shearer?

Outlook: Grim.