LockerRoom:It's a lonely old business this waiting for the great leap forward. Poor old Stan was ushered off the stage after all the plates he tried to keep spinning crashed to the floor and he went all redfaced and had to concede he hadn't actually known that much about spinning plates in the first place.

The ringmaster, the slender guy with the foppish quiff, stepped in though and told us he personally wouldn't be auditioning the acts anymore and he recognised that seeing plates crash to the floor wasn't exactly topline entertainment in this day and age and he would be seeing to it we got something a little more sophisticated in future.

To this end he wouldn't be hiring the next headliner himself. There were people who would do that sort of thing, apparently. They might go to the Continent, where all manner of sophisticated artistry was available. And then! Ta da! Before you can say, "Knees up, Mother Brown," we are being asked to clap our hands together and look excited about Mistah Terry Venables.

El Tel is being offered to us as a break from the tradition of rinky-dink managers! Not just that but this most jaded and traditional of acts has been auditioned by the foppish ringmaster himself and now in a bizarre piece of reverse engineering is being passed on to the people who were supposed to find and audition him in the first place.

It's a little piece of tapdancing designed to soothe the foppish ringmaster fella, who doesn't believe that the buck ever stops with him.

Of course we in the media are full of it. The FAI is happily leaking every detail about the process and using the media as a sort of bargain-basement focus group.

Now El Tel has always been quite the silver-tongued charmer when it comes to the media. Owning a watering hole called Scribes West was a fantastic way to make the Fourth Estate think he was a fine fellow, and if you flick through El Tel's back pages you will find his apologists and supporters have always vastly outnumbered his detractors.

And so this week there is no questioning the wisdom of appointing a man who has just been bumped from his job assisting in one of the most humiliating periods of history English football has known. Hey! Lighten up, folks, he's good enough for us. And he's popular with the biro jockeys. We need be no more ambitious than that.

Even the name, El Tel, so redolent of straw hats with Kiss Me Quick on them and oul wans singing Una Paloma Blanca, was bestowed on Venables as an honorific by a grateful tabloidery when, by moving to Barcelona at the start of the 1984-1985 season, he gave them the chance to make regular, all-expenses-paid trips to Spain.

Lots of what is believed to be true about Venables as a coach and manager stems from that time in Spain. He wasn't though, as sometimes supposed, the great master of the technical and tactical arts people suppose him to be. Bernd Schuster (not a Venables signing) was in his late pomp and drove Barca to success from midfield that year.

Barca played a traditional English 4-4-2 style though, and when the rest of Spain caught up months later the jig was up. Barca lost the following year's European Cup final to Steaua Bucharest despite playing in Seville in front of 50,000 of their own supporters.

Venables talked up beforehand the sort of football they would play but never delivered and a scoreless game went to extra time and then penalties.

More interestingly, Bernd Schuster, when taken off, walked straight out of the stadium and never mended his relationship with Venables, a split with a key player which was to presage Venables's inability to get along with either Olivier Dacourt or David Batty when he would become manager of Leeds United many years later.

Venables was eventually fired from Barcelona having failed to trouble the engravers with the task of etching Barca's name on to any more silverware. He brought Gary Lineker to the city, a good move counterbalanced by bringing Mark Hughes also. One worked. One didn't. Not the stuff of genius.

He returned to England to manage Tottenham for six years during which he won an FA Cup (Spurs' traditional win in a year with a one in it), and despite spending freely and securing one third-place finish he never really launched Spurs to be anything better than the mid-table side he was hired to stop them being.

Inevitably again, a clash of personalities developed and he fell out with Alan Sugar over business dealings. Venables beetled away, hired some learned friends and gained a temporary injunction to have himself reinstated. Later though he lost a high court hearing and was ordered to pay costs.

His assiduous courting of key media people though paid dividends again.

Graham Taylor , more to be pitied than laughed at, was laughed out of the England job when he failed to get them to the 1994 World Cup. The red tops wanted El Tel for England. The FA blazers viewed him as damaged goods (something which doesn't bother us at all) and eventually succumbed but wouldn't dignify him with the title of England manager. He was coach.

England hosted the 1996 European Championship. Sparing themselves the need to qualify.

Venables's talented team played some good football but couldn't close the deal. They went out on penalties to Germany in the semi-final. Probably the pinnacle of Venables's managerial career.

Everything since then has been vaguely comical. Managing Australia and contriving to lose out on World Cup qualification in a play-off with Iran. He consulted at Portsmouth. He left in controversial circumstances, with Portsmouth bottom of the table. He spent nine ignominious months at Crystal Palace before leaving in acrimony with no success to show.

He was out of management for two years before becoming "head coach" to Bryan Robson at free-spending Middlesbrough. His acumen helped Boro secure a wonderful 14th-place finish. He walked after six months.

On and on.

In July 2002, Venables came across the poster boy for chairmen with more money than sense, Peter Ridsdale, and became manager of Leeds United. By December 2002 poor old Leeds realised they had the manager they deserved.

The team had crashed out of the League Cup and the Uefa Cup and were mired in the bottom half of the table. By March 2003 Venables had been sacked, jacked and fired.

And since his CV has been fleshed out with the glory of being assistant to Steve McClaren, he takes a generous share of the blame for England's heroically comical failure to qualify for next summer's European Championship.

This then is the beaten docket the FAI is holding up to us as if it were the Golden Ticket to Willie Wonka's chocolate factory. A guy whose isolated successes have been overhyped and oversold, a guy who cuts and runs in any place where he doesn't fall out with players or officialdom, a guy from whom the smell of cordite is never far away.

This then is the limit of our ambitions? More of the same? England are raising their eyes and looking at Jose Mourinho. We are scrapping about for England's cast-offs.

What's that quote Roy Keane is fond of? To keep doing the same thing expecting different results is the definition of stupidity.

C'mon down, Tel. Have a pint of the black stuff and tell us how Oirish you feel, begob and bejapers.