It's Wayne Rooney's fault.

'England crash out of the World Cup.'

That's as original a headline as 'Bear shits in woods' or 'Pope a catholic shocker.'

What I am always surprised about is why we are always surprised.

I was a less than average, bordering on crap, footballer, trundling my way through 25 years of parks football.  From the touchline, I could pick a pass, spot a run, but in the middle of the action, I couldn't trap a bag of cement.

I wasn't alone.  Even the better teams were based on pace, power and tackling.  Smaller players were ignored because, well, they were smaller.

When I had children of my own, they both played football and I soon learned why English football was so bad.

My oldest son, happily, was coached and managed by proper football men who could see beyond winning (although I am not going to pretend they didn't want to win).  They developed boys, it was not win at all costs.  But these coaches were the exceptions.

Most of the rest did want to win at all costs, playing 'ringers' from academies, roared on by passionate, pushy and occasionally abusive parents.   It was a chilling insight.

And the facilities?  Often the boys played, in 11 a side football at age 11, on a full sized municipal mud bath.   Mostly, they arrived in their kit and left in it, sitting on blankets in their parents cars.  At many places, games were delayed by the need to remove cans, glass and, of course, dog shit.

In fact, in the many games my sons played over a decade, you could count on the fingers of two hands how many times they were able to use a changing room.

As the national team blunders from one tournament defeat to another, so youth football flounders the same.

In 1992, we squirmed as Carlton Palmer miscontrolled his way through the European Championships but Palmer became the template for the young players we were developing.

Strong, powerful, able to get up and down the pitch all day (a good engine, they call it) and crucially able to boot the ball a long way.  I have seen scores of players like that  but hardly ever a Jack Wilshere-type player.

Whilst the Premier League was trousering billions of pounds and lining the pockets of mostly foreign players, the parents of the players of our future were forking out their own kind of fortune to let them be coached by some of the players' dads.

Youth football and below is a mess.

I am not a huge fan of Jose Mourinho, but he got one thing bang on when he said, "In England they teach children to win.  In Spain, they teach them to play football."

Winning comes naturally and I strongly believe the competitive instinct, which is not the same with everyone, will evolve naturally, where it exists.

No more do we want the coach to berate the small boy who has dribbled too far and lost the ball. No.  The coach should be telling him to try again.  But I have even seen coaches substitute boys of 10 and 11 for not 'getting rid of it.'

I have seen youth football abroad, especially in the Netherlands, and it's a different world.

The pitches are smaller, the teams are smaller, the skills are better, the parents are silent and if they say anything, anything at all, they are sent away.

I am not convinced there is any desire in our country to change things because the emphasis is always on the Premier League, particularly now we have exited the tournament. 

I think we'll be back here again in two years time and literally nothing will have changed.

And it will still all be Wayne Rooney's fault.