WELL, at least Kevin Keegan is only the caretaker manager.

Oh no! I forgot. Some bright spark persuaded him to stay on after this doomed Euro 2000 campaign.

"I thought the commitment was there," was Keegan's assessment of last night's fiasco.

If that's the level of commitment you are looking for, Kev, please convert to some obscure faith and reveal your beliefs to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph. Off the record, of course.

And unlike Ruud Gullit, Keegan cannot recognise a passenger when he sees one. That was obvious when he substituted the only bright spark of the first half, Robbie Fowler, instead of his captain.

Alan Shearer proudly professed that there was no better striker in the country following his hat-trick against Luxembourg on Saturday.

I wonder how long it is since he saw a Sunday League football match? Shearer was not on his own in his total ineptitude. David Batty would not even be half-dangerous if he had half a brain, and our pretty boys David Beckham and Steve McManaman on the wings, were pretty blinking awful.

Their time would have been better spent sitting in a Warsaw barber's shop. So, come the next match (some meaningless summer friendly because Sweden will not be so stupid as to stop the utterly dreadful Poles from qualifying), the posing pair will at least be able to see what they are doing. I would not pick Beckham to represent my country at tiddlywinks as he would still be more concerned about breaking a fingernail.

We have all seen Beckham do brilliant things with a football but I have still only seen him play one good game of football, against INTER MILAN and, more pertinently, Diego Simeone.

Presumably, there was not as much at stake last night. And did anyone else see Alan Smith rush to help McManaman off with his boots?

Admittedly I would have done the same, but only so I could use them to tan his idle backside.

Then, of course, there was the referee. England clearly should have had at least one penalty but the harsh reality is that England placed themselves at his mercy.

If the team, its managers and its players, had been focused and committed from day one of the campaign, their destiny would not have been in the hands of some Austrian wimp faced with the wrath of 15,000 Polish nutters.

Let's look on the bright side, though, and not just the fact that the scum which climbs out of the sewers to follow English football abroad will not be inflicted on Holland and Belgium next summer.

England did have one hero on the night.

Joe Royle is a breath of fresh air in the commentary box. At last we have an analyser who can read the game, stay impartial, speak his mind and speak English

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.