Where have all the cowboys gone?

England don't even have joke candidates anymore...

Wanted: Football manager, preferably English or from the UK, for temporary role with chance of becoming full-time should they exceed expectations. Applicant must be happy just to have the job, respect his bosses (and their decisions), have good communication skills, and must be able to work under great media attention including turning up at your house/work/children's school/in fake sheikh fancy dress.

Everyone knows England lacks top class managers and coaches. The Premier League only contains the sixty-somethings Harry Redknapp and Roy Hodgson and 50-year-old Alan Pardew. The Championship, often neglected when English managerial talent is mentioned, is full of plenty of local talent but until they step up to the pressures and expectations of the Premiership it would be a massive gamble to give them the top job in the country.

Or so you would think. Jurgen Klinsmann, and his successor Jogi Low have little success at club level but they have had success with the German national team. Frank Rijkaard and Marco van Basten have coached the Netherlands with less success while France often promoted coaches from Clairfontaine with varying levels of management experience.

International management is a different game to club management. The demands are different, the skills needed are different, the job is simply different, as Capello found to his cost and Harry Redknapp, favoured to take over either in the medium or long term, may find out as well. Should we be looking for a different type of manager?

Stuart Pearce is only signed on for the friendly against Holland at the end of the month - too short an experiment to find out whether his exposure to international management, albeit with the U21s, has taught him skills that would make him successful at senior level. Pearce was not a failure at Man City but nor was he a rip roaring success, and with the U21s he has taken England to three successive Euro championships which, like the senior team, was never a guarantee in the past.

Promoting the U21 coach would be a novel approach for the FA, but what about someone like Sir Trevor Brooking or Gareth Southgate? Men who have played for England, suffered the tournament heartbreak, both have some management experience, and both know about the machinations of the FA. They would be company men, toe the line, and perhaps step away from the media glare and with the reduced pressure they may perform better.

How about other ex pros? Alan Shearer? Paul Ince? Tony Adams? Sure, you wouldn't actually want them to take control of England, but why aren't they getting mentioned? Why aren't they getting involved in the international setup as coaches, assistant coaches etc. Maybe the calamity at the FA stops any long term planning, so Noel Blake at the U19s won't step up to the U21s and we don't get that conveyor-belt going.

Perhaps Redknapp being the obvious candidate makes all discussion mute and the expectations of the media and the fans for the next England manager to be the messiah (and when he fails, for the next guy to be the messiah, and so on...) cuts off a lot of potential candidates. But that doesn't mean we should not have the debate. we should be talking about all the managers, exploring all the paths they can take to the England job, and how those paths can be opened up and multiplied.

Even the joke candidates have their uses. The debate is as important as the decision. But with Harry the only man for the job, we will get stuck in the same cycles as before.