Euro 2016: McManaman Exclusive - Worst ever England defeat will taint players forever

There are no words to describe what I witnessed in Nice on the night of Monday, June 27^th 2016, a date that will forever be etched into English football folklore as the day when we suffered our worst ever defeat.They talk England’s defeat to USA at the 1950 World Cup finals as if that was the low of lows, but this has to be right up there alongside it. 

This was a catastrophic shambles that left all of us looking at each other after the whistle struggling to believe what we had just witnessed. It was like a bad dream, a football match that came and went in a flash and instantly became part of the English football infamy.

Former England manager Glenn Hoddle and ex-England defender Martin Keown were among those I was chatting to after the game and there was a sense of bemusement and disbelief about what had just taken place before our eyes. It was surreal.

[Euro 2016: Time for Rooney to retire?]

[Iceland's win easier than expected, says coach]

[England 1-2 Iceland in pictures]

[Euro 2016: Hodgson resigns following Iceland humiliation]

If this wasn’t a serious disaster for English football, you would laugh at it, but it is serious, very serious.

Roy Hodgson had no option other than to resign as England manager and he didn’t take long in doing so, but his departure was the only inevitability after a truly abject performance from what I still believe to be a squad of talented players.

Hodgson will take a lot of the blame for this Euro 2016 debacle and right so because he was exposed as a manager devoid of ideas and clearly not up to the job of winning matches in major tournaments.

Roy is a nice fella, we all know that, but his tactics and organisation have been abject for two successive tournaments now and England have paid a heavy price.

I was in Brazil to witness England’s World Cup showing two years ago and somehow, Hodgson managed to hang on to his job on the premise that progress was being made with a group of young players, who would be ready to peak in time for this summer’s European Championships.

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[Apologetic Hart "devastated" by England loss]

Well, here we are in France and the same manager has overseen what is almost certainly the worst single defeat in the history of the England national team and belatedly, he has left his post.

Of course, this is not all just down to Hodgson. His coaching staff of Ray Lewington and Gary Neville are part of this embarrassment and so are all the players, who turned in a dreadful performance against an Iceland side who were little more than well organised and clever in their approach to the game.

Iceland did nothing incredible to beat England and yet they created the better chances in a second half when Hodgson’s side should have been pouring forward and in the end, they won this game with relative ease. England had run out of ideas long before the final whistle, with Hodgson’s plan of throwing on every striker he had in his squad and just hoping something might happen in the last 15 minutes highlighting his lack of a Plan A or Plan B that had any hope of success.

The ramifications from this lamentable effort from England at Euro 2016 will rumble on for weeks and months to come and I come away from the stadium a little too stunned to contemplate what could or should happen next.

Congratulations to Iceland. They proved themselves to be a team capable of rising to the challenge and exceeding expectations against opponents that were not up to the job and deserved everything that came their way. They were honest, passionate, committed and in the end, they recorded the greatest victory in their nation’s sporting history.

Meanwhile, everyone associated with this dark day for English football will never live it down. It can’t get any lower than this.