Nelson is remembered not just for his victories, but for the way he turned his blind eye to a message he preferred not to see.  Over the years it has become a national trait, most famously demonstrated by Chamberlain on his return from Berlin.  The results are often catastrophic.

Last week, at Wembley Stadium, England lost to an average German team, and once again we choose to ignore the messages.  Most of England's players earn their living in the Premiership, where the pace is as fast and furious as a pin-ball machine.  Players do not need skills to control the ball or retain possession because sooner or later the ball will ricochet their way again.  If they can take advantage of a small number of these chance opportunities their team will enjoy a measure of success.  This is why formation and tactics are so important to the England game: players have to be in the right place to collect the ricochets.  However, against more talented players they do not gain possession by chance, and England very quickly look inept.  Even in the Finland match England were unexceptional, with the excuse that players were asked to play out of position in the wrong formation.  It is hard to imagine that eleven skilled ball-players from France or Brazil who had never trained together would have failed to score goals against Finland.  From time to time we enthuse over a player like Gascoine or Owen, but opposing teams include half a dozen players with those skills. The message we prefer not to see is the need for an experienced manager or coach who can identify and encourage natural footballing talent, from a Premiership where quality is rewarded, which draws on youth programmes designed to produce the skill and vision required on a football pitch.

In the wider scheme of things events in football cannot be measured on the scale of catastrophe, but our newspapers seem to think that the replacement of the England manager deserves the same kind of national coverage as real disasters.  Unfortunately, most media writers seem to be looking through Nelson's telescope.  The single most important message from Keegan's reign must be that the wrong person was offered the job.  The Football Association now stress the importance of experience, a quality that any recruitment specialist would insist on for a senior management position.  But Keegan was appointed on the strength of 'public opinion', or rather, the overwhelming case made for his appointment by the media.  His sole experience at the top level was a short spell in charge of Newcastle, resulting in failure on the pitch and an inability to handle pressure off the pitch.

One might now expect the media to be calling for an appointment based on more traditional methods of recruitment: a job specification to be drawn up and suitable candidates interviewed and invited to comment on how they would tackle the challenge.  But with their telescopes fixed firmly on some distant and irrelevant past the call is for 'the people's choice', not now Kevin Keegan but Terry Venables.  Venables, despite his murky past, might yet prove to be the best candidate for the job, but it might be helpful for the decision-makers not to be swamped once again by the weight of public opinion.  If we put down our telescopes we will realise that the horizon, our future, is made of three hundred and sixty degrees.