Naaa, na na naaa, naaa, na-na, na-na, na-naaa. Along the Thames, the cranes dip in memoriam. The wreaths pile up at the Grave of the Unknown Striker and the nation wonders why the Queen hasn't acknowledged our grief. After all, this is so much bigger than the vain, self-indulgent sorrows of yesteryear. Wars come and go, and blue bloods get killed joyriding all the time, but this - this is the football. As the cortege bearing our hopes and dreams and Steve McClaren's contract crawls through the streets of London past Hyde Park and the broken water feature which must surely now be renamed the Moscow fountain, thousands pause to reflect that finally we know how a real tragedy feels.
And as always when you're prostrate in the wreckage of any car crash, the mind tends to dwell on past errors. One goal at home to Macedonia would have been enough. The last time they beat anybody they were managed by Alexander the Great. And there was Jamie Carragher's header against bloody Israel. Three inches lower, and it would have gone under the bar rather than bouncing back off it. If only Britain hadn't collaborated with the Zionists in the 1930s, we might have been spared all this suffering now. Couldn't they have thought about the bigger picture?
It's all very well for you. You were just going to watch it. I was going to write about it. I can't believe the way they've let me down.
But, and it's a medium-sized but, there still remains a little hope. If England beat Croatia at Wembley and Russia don't win their last two games against Israel and Andorra, or if Macedonia beat Croatia and we also beat them by three clear goals, we still go to the ball.
Yet surely these are delusions, mere distractions from the dismal facts. One might as well hope to destroy a Death Star by firing one up its exhaust port. George Lucas can indulge such flights of fancy if he chooses, but in the real world England have lost the Force, and so have I. I can't even be bothered to manufacture some kind of double entendre about firing things up exhaust ports.
And Scotland fucked up as well. Whatever.