Nowadays the England job swaddles a man in wealth but it can never keep out the cold. Steve McClaren felt that chill in the years beside Sven-Goran Eriksson and he understands the bleakness to come if his team should fail in today's match with Israel or Wednesday's game against Russia. It is conceivable for England to win a couple of matches at Wembley, but McClaren's brief time in the post has left him exposed and doubted.
That long period as Eriksson's sidekick has barely been of help and the comparison with his predecessor is dismaying. The Swede took England to two World Cups and a European Championship by dropping a mere 11 points out of a possible 72. McClaren has let slip seven already and his side have another five Euro 2008 qualifiers yet to negotiate.
In theory Group E should not be fiendish, but the whole experience must be torturous to McClaren. After all, he was 40 by the time he got his first job as a manager, at Middlesbrough in 2001. While he had been good enough as a coach to earn the respect of a curmudgeon like Roy Keane, promotion has sometimes taxed him.
Jim Smith, who played a significant part in McClaren's rise by making him his assistant at Derby County in 1995, has noticed the novelty of the younger man's situation. "I've told him myself," said Smith, "that in a funny kind of a way he became a club manager a little late and an international manager a bit too early. You'd be better doing that job when you're in your sixties."
McClaren comes across as being uneasy with his vertiginously public role and, on a bad day, his press conference remarks are a daisy chain of motivational slogans. All of that would be an irrelevance if results had not deteriorated under McClaren.
It would be dishonest now to reimagine Eriksson as a virtuoso, but he did possess credentials far beyond those of his successor. The strength of McClaren's candidacy lay purely in the comparison with his own countrymen. By winning the League Cup in 2004 he became the first English manager of a Premier League club to land a trophy since Brian Little's Aston Villa won the same competition eight years before.
There is a debate to be had about McClaren's record. How come, with Steve Gibson spending energetically, he only got Middlesbrough into the top half of the table once in five seasons? Does the clobbering by Sevilla in the 2006 Uefa Cup final devalue the helter-skelter adventure of the previous rounds?
McClaren himself embodies uncertainty. He began his England tenure with idealism as he paid off some members of the old guard, such as David James, Sol Campbell and David Beckham. That left him open to derision when he started to reinstate them. It would, in reality, be fairer to say that he discovered the England job to be tough enough without trying to incorporate visions and ideals.
For much of his career, McClaren had the luxury of thinking about football without being held accountable for results. Jim Smith jokes that he was first impressed by his future assistant when McClaren was pouring him a glass of red wine in the office of Oxford United's then caretaker manager Maurice Evans.
McClaren evidently had more to offer than that. He went from working with reserves and youth players to receiving considerable credit at Derby County as the club reached the Premier League and settled there for a period. A reputation for innovation was earned and his interest in the emerging technology of ProZone ensured he was known as a bright spark.
Sir Alex Ferguson gave much thought to the replacement for Brian Kidd at Old Trafford and two months elapsed before McClaren began working as his assistant in February 1999. From then until the summer of 2001, United won, among other things, three Premier League titles and the Champions League.
It is only fair to assume that McClaren's efforts in the background and on the training field were important to those achievements. "Football doesn't get much bigger than it was at United then," argues Smith, scoffing at the suggestion that England duties might be overwhelming for McClaren. The true issue, none the less, was whether he could extend that accomplishment when he alone was accountable for results. His record at Middlesbrough is ambiguous.
Indeed, he had to pull off a remarkable recovery to survive as a candidate for the post of England manager. During that season Boro lost 7-0 at Arsenal and a fan marched towards the dug-out during the 4-0 home defeat by Aston Villa in February to throw away his season ticket. It looked likelier that McClaren would be dismissed rather than promoted as Eriksson's heir.
A week later at the Riverside, Chelsea were trounced 3-0. That is the sole occasion in Jose Mourinho's reign that any English club has scored three times against his side in the league. Some put Middlesbrough's feat down to the eloquence of McClaren in motivating the team and others, in a more grudging interpretation, handed the credit to the influence of senior players.
Whatever the cause, there had been a spectacular recovery and Middlesbrough went on to an FA Cup semi-final as well as the Uefa Cup final. If he hopes to remain England manager McClaren needs to show in the next few days that the transformation of 2006 was no fluke.
