It's been a pretty busy week away from Sixfields with the papers concentrating their efforts on the search for the next England manager.
The king is dead, long live the king, as they say. Steve McClaren rightly paid for his team's failure to qualify for the European Championships with his job. Any situation where you need Israel - and later, desperately, Andorra - to do you a favour is truly a hopeless one.
Had England qualified to go to Austria and Switzerland next summer it would have been nothing short of a travesty. Croatia, and to a much lesser extent Russia, were comfortably better than us, and the manner of the defeat last Wednesday was seriously troubling.
You can talk all you like about passion and 'playing for the shirt', but as far as I'm concerned Croatia's 3-2 win in the Wembley quagmire underlined the technical deficiencies of the current crop of players representing this country.
To a man they needed at least one touch to control it, at least one more to get it onto their stronger foot, and only then did they look up for a pass.
Croatia, on the other hand, were either going past their man or knocking it early with their first touch. The amount of space they had for the majority of the game was alarming at best and simply embarrassing at worst.
So the problems run much deeper than just the current England team. I'll never forget my first PE lesson when I arrived at middle school as a nine-year-old. I was told I couldn't be a defender unless I was able to kick the ball at least 50 metres.
Looking back, I suppose there was every chance the teacher was joking because 'coaching' advice like that, much like the performances served up by England in the last 18 months, is nothing more than a joke.

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