Nivea Great Football Experiment

There are plenty of big jobs in English football and at clubs across the country but the undeniable pinnacle of all that is managing the national team and leading out the cream of the nation's football-playing talent. For better or worse, a stint as the country's gaffer will usually end up being a career-defining period for a manager as the highs and lows are felt by millions of die-hard fans and played out on an international stage.

It isn't all that difficult to find most people's pick as England's greatest ever manager for the simple reason that there has been only one World Cup winning English outfit. The humbly authoritative Sir Alf Ramsey was the first man to select the team on his own rather than via a committee and he led Bobby Charlton and co to a controversial 4-2 extra time triumph over West Germany in 1966.

For England fans with long but not-quite-so-long memories, the most revered and respected national manager is arguably Sir Bobby Robson, who took his team as far as the semi-finals of the Italia '90 World Cup and was unlucky not to go further.

Some managers aren't so fortunate or so successful as to go down in history as great or even good England football managers. Graham Taylor is a highly respected football man but his failure to secure England's passage to the 1994 World Cup finals in the USA saw him lampooned by the British press and his tenure thereafter was short-lived. Taylor never played for England but even being a legend on the pitch is not enough to shield national managers from scathing criticism if their team's performances fall short of expectations, as they very often do and as Kevin Keegan found to his cost and disappointment after a fleeting spell in charge.

After Keegan's failure to take the national team any further than the group stages in Euro 2000, there came the somewhat controversial appointment of Sven-Goran Eriksson, England's first non-English manager. The ever-serene Sven led the likes of David Beckham and Paul Scholes to successive World Cup quarter finals before bowing out and making room at the top for his understudy in the post Steve McLaren. The so-called 'Wally with the Brolly' showed just how tough a job it can be to manage the England national team when he failed to secure qualification to the European championships of 2008 and found himself on the end of some sharp barbs from the British press.

Incumbent in the job at present Fabio Capello is set to step down after the upcoming Euro 2012 competition even if he manages to end England fans' 46 years of hurt since their last major trophy win. Despite the potential for disaster and ridicule, there will be no shortage of top managers willing to put their hat into the ring again for a shot at glory. One man who came agonisingly close to seeing his England team take their dreams to Wembley and a major tournament final is Terry Venebles, who managed the hopes and expectations of a nation during Euro '96 and helped Ivory FC overcome a team of England legends recently as part of the Nivea great football experiment.