HE might be one of University of York’s alumni, an erstwhile Chancellor indeed, but Greg Dyke should also be awarded a degree in “stating the bleeding obvious” as a pent-up Basil Fawlty might exclaim.

The newly-installed chairman of the FA this week delivered a state of the union address into the future of the national England team. What did he tell us? That we’re not particularly good.

Wow, that took some discovering. It must have been a thorough delve into the record-books scouring stats, match reports, tournament reviews and world ratings, the latter one of the biggest jokes in any organisation that submits itself almost obsessively to anything involving co-efficients.

Well, Greg, just ask any long-suffering follower of the Three Lions crew and he or she will tell you that we have been effectively useless on the world stage since 1990.

And before that you had to go back 20 years to Mexico when England’s squad was arguably stronger than the one which won the World Cup for the one and only time four years earlier.

Some would argue that, also with the benefit of home turf, England advanced to the semi-finals of the Euros – Gazza, dentist chair, the poaching of Alan Shearer, and yet another ggrrr...German penalty shoot-out win. But that team was not a patch on 1990, nor 1970 and certainly not that of 1966 – the zenith against which all future national squads have been, perhaps somewhat, unfairly judged.

In among Dyke’s deliberations there seems to have been several bouts of collective amnesia.

For during England’s most fallow years we have been saddled with FA appointments that do not bear great scrutiny.

Just lately – Fabio Capello on £6million a year but barely speaking enough English for Wayne Rooney to comprehend; York’s own Steve McClaren, whose acute technical grasp at Manchester United dissolved during his reign; Sven Goran-Eriksson, who seemed more in thrall to celebrity and the brand of David Beckham than establishing England as super-power and Kevin Keegan, who found it all too much.

Currently we have Roy Hodgson in charge, another in the long line of avuncular senior figures who are rewarded after riding a brief crest as flavour of the week, month, season etc.

Not a great track record, eh FA, though no doubt the blue blazered-brigade will argue they were the popular choices of the day.

What England has always demanded is passion and to their detriment they actually let go one man, who embodied fire in the belly as well as sampling regular success on the international stage.

Step forward Stuart Pearce, or rather step out of the limelight after he paid the ultimate price for a calamitous England Under-21 performance during the European Championships in the summer.

Yes, the England cubs did not win a game, but they were hamstrung more fatally than a cobbled horse by a catalogue of injuries and players being yanked from their ranks into the senior squad for a quite pointless tour of South America.

Somehow, Spain, nor Holland, nor Germany would ever do such a thing. They allow their U21 stars to continue to flourish on the youth stage, with some players spurning the chance of full caps to ensure the U21 squad is as strong as possible.

But Pearce, who blooded a succession of talent now viewed as genuine senior hopes, was jettisoned as the scapegoat and replaced by Gareth Southgate, who fits the FA template right down to his obligatory Sir Trevor Brooking-like blandness.

As if to put a bigger boot in, Dyke then complained that England’s chances of success were diluted by having too many foreign imports.

Hang on a mo, Greg old boy. The same argument was persisted with in cricket but look at England now, dominating almost all at a time when every county still has its fair share of imports.

To cite the case of not enough English players appearing regularly in the top-flight is lazy and offers a ready-made excuse for failure.