England’s latest international soccer tournament ended in such a disaster — going out in the Euro 2016 round-of-16 against Iceland — that things concerning the Football Association got weirder than usual.

Following the 2-1 disaster versus tiny Iceland, England coach Roy Hodgson resigned, as he had to, for professional reasons but also because he seemed about one piece of bad news away from going catatonic.

Which prompted a crazy, half-arsed, English-inflected search for a new coach to lead the “Three Lions” in qualifying for the 2018 World Cup and (one would hope, wouldn’t one?) to lead England at the 2018 World Cup, in Russia.

How crazy and half-arsed was the search? At one point, Jurgen Klinsmann was the betting-line favorite to get the job, much to the astonishment of American soccer fans … and career mediocrity Sam Allardyce, whose main qualification for the job undoubtedly was that he is English, got a two-year contract to run England’s most important team.

And I like Sam Allardyce.

England has reached a strange place, in the world of “football”.

It is home to undoubtedly the most successful and recognized soccer league in the history of the game, the English Premier League, which has done an excellent job of following the NFL playbook — leveraging its unassailable position at the top of the game into enormous TV contracts and so much money that it threatens to drown everyone in pounds sterling.

Meantime, the English national team seems to be steadily sinking toward irrelevance. There was that World Cup championship on home soil just the other day — 1966 — but since reaching the semifinals of the 1990 World Cup, here are England’s results in the planet’s biggest competition: 1994, failed to qualify; 1998, round of 16; 2002, quarterfinals; 2006, quarterfinals; 2010; round of 16 (after finishing behind the U.S. in group play); 2014, group stage.

And here are England’s results in the European Championship in this century: 2000, group stage; 2004, quarterfinals; 2008, did not qualify; 2012, quarterfinals; 2016: round of 16.

Those are the sort of not-really-contending performances a person might expect out of Austria or Sweden … but not from the Masters of the Game.

And in this mini-era of “England for the English” (see: Brexit), the FA apparently decided they really wanted an English coach to replace the failed English coach, and given their field of candidates … well, Allardyce was as good as they were going to get.

However …

However, Big Sam, as he is known, does not have the sort of record that suggests “world” or “European champions” is something England can expect any time soon.

His biggest claim to fame is “never having been relegated” while coaching a team, even though he has spent time at some of the Premier League’s middling (or worse) sides, such as Bolton, Blackburn, West Ham and, most recently, Sunderland — which he rescued from what seemed like sure relegation last spring to secure (with a week to spare!) another year in the Premier League.

He has never coached one of the “big” English teams, which his fans would say is more about the likes of Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool and Manchester City preferring foreign coaches. (Allardyce once said he might have been hired if his name were “Allardici”.)

Big Sam comes across a bit like a relic from an earlier age of coaches, with his preference for a safety-first 4-4-2 formation, scoring on restarts and using a big lad up top who can be the target of crosses into the box.  Jose Mourinho called it “football from the 19th century” after his Chelsea settled for a scoreless draw with Big Sam’s West Ham. But England have reached a point where they could stand some good, old (very old) English style of football.

Allardyce is not, really, a dinosaur. He was one of the first coaches in England to embrace advanced statistical analysis. He has played the hand dealt him at the Sutherlands and Blackpools, and could anyone really expect him to win a trophy at the places he has been?

English football was traumatized by the Iceland result, and at this point would like to see results that generally reflect what they believe is still a fairly standard of talent among English players — victories over teams they ought to beat, the occasional victory over teams they are not expected to beat.

Allardyce is the kind of guy who knows when to push for a win and when to settle for a draw, who has a clear plan ahead of every match — and England wants that, at the moment. No early exits, no defeats to Iceland. No unpleasant surprises, please.

The sense in England seems to be that foreign coaches are hard to come to like (say hello, Fabio Capello, Sven-Goran Ericksson) and perhaps don’t really know the secret for making the English play like Spain or Brazil. Or even as well as England ought to play.

So, after getting past the Jurgen Klinsmann moment, they settled on the most dependable, most even-keeled and most English coach they could find. In Sam Allardyce, they have him. Whether he manages anything more than “middle of the pack” success, which has been his history to date, will be interesting to see.