They think its all over-well it is now!

These were the closing comments of the 1966 World Cup against Germany. There will be a host of pundits telling us why it all went so badly wrong this time! I'm sure in the fullness of time many Ph'd's will be written about the slow demise of the English and their beautiful game. If you had to diagnose the cause what would it be? Some in the past have suggested that there is a correlation between the decline of our working class industrial heritage or that there are too many foreign players in the Premier League or we had a foreign coach who struggled with speaking English or that we have too few coaches compared to our other competitors or the players are paid too much and therefore are not hungry enough to win or the structure of the FA is at fault or we don't have the right sort of weather or the grass is too short or too long. The truth is that no one knows the correct answer-if they did perhaps we would have taken the appropriate medicine? My view is at the national-collective unconscious level-to use the term coined by the analytic psychologist Carl Jung we now expect to do badly as a nation. Boy George the chancellor made the comment last week in the Palace of Varieties when introducing his first Budget that one good reason for cancelling the intended tax increase on cider was that we could either celebrate our success or our failure in the World Cup. An expectation of failure is very much in the national psyche-we are just not good enough!