Chris Flanagan column: There was a time, not so long ago, when it was decided that three consecutive quarter-finals was not good enough.

A narrow defeat to Brazil and two penalty shoot-out losses to Portugal were unacceptable.

The coach simply had to go. Worked out well, didn’t it?

First there was the cheaper, less Swedish option. Qualification for Euro 2008 under Steve McClaren was swiftly and skilfully avoided.

So find us another pricy foreigner, the less English he speaks the better. He can get by with a few stock answers.

Think of that scene in Father Ted, when the vocabularily-challenged Father Jack holds a conversation using only the phrases ‘yes’ and ‘that would be an ecumenical matter’, and you would not be too far away from the usual Fabio Capello post-match interview.

For a while, it was tolerable. It was hard to warm to Capello, but the results were coming.

Yet, for £6m a year, Capello delivered only World Cup embarrassment. A fiasco from start to finish.

Franz Beckenbauer was right. England’s biggest error was not losing 4-1 to Germany, as bad as that was, but finding themselves in the position where they had to face them in the second round.

In the end, their campaign simply never recovered from the body blow of Robert Green’s error against the United States.

England’s hopes of winning the World Cup, as tenuous as they already were, ended beyond any doubt once Landon Donovan’s late goal gave the US top spot in Group C. If England had not lost to Germany, they would certainly have succumbed to Argentina – long before any thoughts of taking on Brazil in the final.

Instead, by winning the group they could have faced Ghana then Uruguay. By World Cup standards, that’s as good as you’re ever going to get.

Under Sven-Goran Eriksson, there was no embarrassment, no open challenges to his authority by senior players.

They may not have won the World Cup, but they played to a level at least approaching their capability.

They even played Wayne Rooney up front on his own – even if that was viewed as stupidity at the time, with Rooney’s isolation supposedly leading to his red card against Portugal.

Many still like to deride Eriksson.

But maybe, by comparison, he wasn’t so bad after all.