How do nations like Turkey - no disrespect intended - with decent yet unremarkable players, produce a national team that played the way they did against Germany last night?
They were excellent in every department except perhaps in goal and they we
re desperately unlucky not to get at least extra time.
How do players like Colin Kazim-Richards who struggled to make his mark with Sheffield United and other English teams look like quality players on the highest stage of all?
And how do England manage to make good players, some world-class, look so mediocre?
There can only be three answers.
Manager, culture, belief.
Teams that do well have a manager who is decisive, knows his best team and how to organise them and is lucky.
All the managers that do well are able to draw on a culture of success and/or create their own.
All the cultures of success are based on belief.
Players have to believe in each other, the system and the manager. From that belief the culture develops.
England have no culture of success to call on, only near-misses and failure.
The success of 1966 has become a weight of expectation that gets heavier with every fresh failure.
Managers have come and gone, some have tried to blend in, others have tried to revolutionise. All were proven before they got the job and all failed to take England to a trophy.
Sven almost got us there but the belief was not strong enough. Bobby Robson was close in 1990, Terry Venables was closer in 1996 when he was Gazza's studs away from getting to the final.
It's too easy, and not true, to say that the players aren't good enough; clearly, as individuals, they are.
Venable created his own culture with similarly talented players. The country believed in him and his team and they believed in each other.
Somehow we have to create another winning culture, and that's what
Fabio Capello has to be about - and he knows it.
He has to begin history again with his revolution. The past is dead, only the future matters.
He has to draw on the spirit not of England 1966 but of Greece 2004 and Denmark 1992, draw inspiration from the teams that created history, created their own winning culture with their unselfishness and hard work.
Teams who believed in the manager, the team and each other.
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