Everyone knew him as a shy bumbling incompetent, but that was before he discovered his magic garment on a trip to Russia, and an amazing transformation took place.

He used to work in a series of dead-end jobs, first at a dreary provincial football club, then somewhere deep in the nether regions of FA Headquarters.

He was thought to be only capable of missing in penalty shootouts, taking Middlesbrough to relegation and coming across as rather dull in interviews whenever he appeared on the TV. And certainly no match for his predecessor, the charismatic but unfortunate ‘Big Sam’, especially when he selected a World Cup squad that was surely far too inexperienced for the job in hand.

But then one day in Russia, everything changed as he found a quiet corner of the dressing room to pull his Waistcoat out of a secret pouch in his trousers, and he was transformed into a tactical genius.

Suddenly England were winning a penalty shootout, the country was blessed with weeks of glorious weather, and drunken yobs in London were going completely crazy and wrecking valuable emergency vehicles. Even though we won.

WaiscoatMan is coming to a TV set near you very soon, as hopes rise that England might actually win the bloody thing, so that the 3 Lions song can finally be banished until at least the year 2048.

Stop Press: We’ve just discovered that plans are already being made for a sequel, WaiscoatMan2. In which Gareth Southgate teaches Donald Trump to use coherent English on Twitter, solves the tricky Irish border question that was too much for David Davies, and gets Raheem Sterling to stop running up blind alleys and pass the ball to a colleague in a better position.

But critics are starting to suggest this is all getting a bit far-fetched, and at least one of those three things would never, ever happen.

Reuters Media Express

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