It's often held that, without Champions League experience, players can't thrive at the top level. Well, Wales and Iceland have just blown that argument out of the water. Admittedly, Bale and Ramsey have loads of it and their team has been together at international level for some time. But they've got many honest triers at Premier League - and Championship - level.
So why are England so perennially poor? Blame the manager? Tempting, but they haven't played as a team at a major tournament since 1996. Were all those managers (Hoddle, Keegan, Eriksson, McLaren, Capello and Hodgson, excluding interims) poor? Maybe.
Blame the weight of expectation? And a catalogue of individual errors from experienced players. Taking just goalkeepers, from David Seaman being done by Ronaldinho to Joe Hart developing weak wrist syndrome in France. Poor, overpaid ninnies.
And weren't they boring to watch? Aimless, passionless, turgid. I read a statistic that horrified me. 58.5%. I thought it might be our possession stat. But it was our successful tackle percentage. The lowest of any nation in France 2016.
How shocking is that? Claudio Ranieri said Leicester won the Premier League with Italian tactics and English heart. OK they had Morgan, Vardy, Drinkwater, Albrighton and Simpson, but a lot of that "English" heart came from Kante, Mahrez, Huth, Fuchs, Okazaki et al.
The one thing an England team don't seem to be able to do anymore is play with English "heart": run, tackle, get a head on it, make a challenge.
And most of the Premier League coaches seem to turn their noses up at these concepts.
I don't think England will get anywhere until we reconnect with our traditional strengths. I doubt this starts with the appointment of a new England manager, when we've stopped producing goalkeepers and the likes of Tery Butcher and John Terry.
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