For England fans up and down the country Tuesday 28th June 2016 was Groundhog Day!

We’ve all seen the film where Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman stuck in a time loop, forced to relive the same day over and over again. For England fans the time loop is stuck on a two-year cycle following an embarrassing defeat at a major football tournament.

We wake up, go to work and have the same discussions, sometimes heated debates, about the lack of passion from the players, the inability of the manager to spot the obvious weaknesses, the players that didn’t go because they don’t play for a big club and of course the vast amounts of money that the 'stars' on show earn.

We know exactly what is going to be the first sentence to come out of the FA’s pre-written statement... “we must learn the lessons from this”. As long as I have been watching football - from around Italia 90 to the present day - we have been hearing this and wondering what are the lessons? Does anybody actually know where it all keeps going wrong? Does anybody at the FA have the guts to stand up and say it?

I asked myself on Tuesday morning what I thought the lessons to be learnt were, and too be honest, I couldn’t come up with anything that hasn’t been said before. The players did appear to have a lack of passion, especially when the chips were down, Roy Hodgson did try to shoehorn in as many players from the 'big clubs' as possible into his unbalanced, unpracticed system and it has to be said the man who has managed at the highest level for so many years stood by and did absolutely nothing when his team and country needed him.

These may all be true statements, but the question still remains what are the lessons that must be learnt? Can we really teach English players to be more passionate, to run through brick walls for each other, to be leaders on the pitch? Surely those attributes are innate in a person, right? Can we really give a manager a job and then insist that person picks the players most in form and most suited to the style of play regardless of the shirt they wear on a Saturday afternoon? Surely that individual is given the job because they know best, right?

One thing I do know for sure is that the defeat to Iceland on Monday 27th June 2016 has to be the worst night in the history of the English national game and this time, this time it’s about more than just learning lessons it’s about instigating a plan to change the future of English football forever, because I, and so many fans, cannot go through another Groundhog Day in two years’ time!

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