So the FA might get an English manager after all thanks to the UK press' old habits dying hard.
Whoever is finally chosen will have emerged the victor of a Herculean series of tests, courtesy of the ever disrespectful tabloid media, who ultimately do not care whether the new manager is English or not.
The howls of protest against another man unschooled in our ancient footballing traditions of grit, long balls and post match boozing sounded at first like despairing Luddism. If Arsenal, an ostensibly 'English' club, win the Champions League next month without fielding any English players, then protesting against a foreign coach for England appears the preserve of the famous 11th century Danish midfielder King Knut, or 17th century Spanish playmaker Don Quixote.
Does the job itself really matter much anyway these days? International football is reeling under attack from the growing power of the clubs. Arsene Wenger has openly said the Champions League is a better competition than the World Cup.
The G14 is trying to force national associations to pay clubs for using their players and while many coaches invent injuries to stop their players representing their countries, international friendlies have been almost hunted to extinction.
If we can agree that international football still matters, and around a billion people around the globe will confirm this to be the case in June, then does the England coach have to be an Englishman? The polyglot Premiership, the top echelon of the domestic game, is flooded with foreign players and only eleven, just over half of the twenty clubs, boast an English manager.
A few years ago a foreigner at the helm of the England team was unthinkable, but the wheels of progress have been spinning. First came talented overseas players such as Eric Cantona, Jurgen Klinsmann and Juninho; then the coaches, and once Arsene Wenger and Gerard Houllier began scooping up a clutch of trophies, even the most ardent little Englander had to grudgingly admit Johnny Foreigner could cut the mustard.
The final nail in the traditionalists' coffin was the appointment in 2000 of a Scottish advertising man with no footballing background as Chief Executive of the FA. Adam Crozier only lasted two and a half years at the helm but metaphorically brought the FA into the modern world.
At Crozier's insistence, swathes of committees were cut, the Premier League got more of a say at the expense of the blazers in the amateur game and the organization itself upped sticks and moved into the heart of media London, leaving the Victorian terraces of Lancaster Gate behind for good.
Crozier was bold enough to hire the first foreigner to coach the national team. In fact he did not think twice about nationality - he just wanted the best man for the job.
The last taboo had been broken it appeared. But now, come 2006 and the prospect of another batch of Englishmen being passed over for the top job in English football has produced a cultural backlash, a last hurrah for old England perhaps. This is to some extent due to six years of frustration with Sven-Goran Eriksson's deadpan style, an awkward and emotionless public face for a game famed for its passion.
Able coaches though they are, the likes of Steve McLaren and Alan Curbishley are not in the same league as Scolari and Guus Hiddink and so their cheerleaders' cries (Alan Pardew and Ian Wright among others) seemed more rooted in romanticism than reality.
In their defence, men like Curbishley have toiled for years amid the mud and rain of English football and not unreasonably expect their loyalty would have allowed them a shot at the top job.
But any considerations of loyalty and nationality have been drowned in recent years by a bigger wave, that of globalization.
When the race card is played it is hard to argue the manager must undergo an Anglo-Saxon blood test. National boundaries and identities have melted in every walk of life and a cursory stroll through multiracial and multilingual London today confirms just that.
But if you are going to have national teams then have national teams. Otherwise you have select elevens to play Serie A and the Bundesliga, contests no one really wants to replace international football, with its peaceful potential for rousing entire populations.
Politics apart, I believe having a national team coach from the same country as the players is, despite the powerful competing arguments, a principle worth upholding.
If the rules say players must only come from England then so should the coach. He is part of team England. I value the intrinsic purity of international football, where you cannot in theory shortcut success à la Chelsea by buying in players from around the world.
The national team should have a manager from the same country for that reason alone, even if English coaches themselves are inferior to their foreign counterparts and even if in the past they have traveled overseas to coach other countries, as Eriksson has pointed out. The national team should in all logic be the representative of a nation's football culture in every way possible.
But irrespective of what passport the England manager should or should not have, the overarching fact is that football traditions are melting in the face of the blast furnace that is world capitalism and there is little, if nothing, the sport can do about it.
Not every industry has opened its doors completely to this fact, but conformity is inevitable.
Accelerating electronic technology and mushrooming affordable air travel have brought the world closer together in every way like never before, and football and the England manager's job, are a part of that process, like it or not.