Don't laugh at Gary Neville's woe: his failure is the failure of English football

Hanging out the bunting because Gary Neville has gone another week without a win in La Liga is to celebrate the failure of English football. If you don't jump up and down when the national team loses then probably don't rejoice at one of the country's most opinionated and intelligent ex-players falling on his face.

The defeat to Real Betis at the weekend left Neville on the brink but it also brought into sharp contrast how managers from the British Isles are viewed in Spain, and Wednesday's 1-1 draw with a team of Barcelona understudies didn't exactly help. Betis have only beaten two teams at home all season – Real Sociedad, when they were coached by David Moyes, and now Valencia managed by Neville.

What's more, former Liga managers in the Premier League are thriving as their British equivalents fail miserably. Mauricio Pochettino is threatening to win the Premier League with Tottenham and Quique Sanchez Flores is giving Watford fans their best season since George Reilly was nodding them.

Pochettino and Sanchez Flores were not always overwhelming successes in La Liga. Poch had his struggles at Espanyol and Flores received as many brickbats as bouquets in an up and down career. But both now speak the language and are over-achieving. Moyes and Neville do not and are not.

"They have a very particular way of telling you," said Neville several weeks ago when speaking about the Mestalla’s reaction to his winless run. He was making the argument that the supporters had still not called for his head. He was right; they had not. But a failure to beat Espanyol at the weekend, arguably the worst side in Spain, will bring out the white handkerchief protests.

Valencia’s Mestalla was three-quarters empty on Wednesday for the second leg of the Spanish Cup semi-final against Barcelona, but there will be closer to the full 55,000 present this weekend – that’s a lot of handkerchiefs for Peter Lim to ignore.

Lim will still be Neville’s friend and business associate and there will still be huge ties of loyalty encouraging the owner to resist calls to make a change - but Sporting Director Jesus Pitarch will urge otherwise, and so will the supporters of the fourth biggest club in Spain.

The lack of top British coaches, and even more striking, the paucity of credible English managers is a strange phenomenon.

Why is it so easy for top Dutch/French/German/Spanish internationals to progress to top coaching jobs when they retire yet impossible for their English counterparts?

It is taken for granted in Spain that Xavi Hernandez and Xabi Alonso will both become excellent managers. Xavi is already taking his badges in Qatar and Alonso went to Bayern precisely to learn from one of the masters. France this summer will be led by Didier Deschamps, who led them to glory on the pitch the last time they hosted a tournament on home soil. Laurent Blanc, another of the leading lights of that 1998 World Cup winning team, coaches France’s biggest club side.

Meanwhile not a single player from the best two England teams from the last 30 years has graduated as a successful top manager. The 1990 group that got to within penalty kicks of the World Cup final in Italy and the 1996 squad that did likewise during the European Championships that England hosted have failed to produce a single top manager.

Terry Butcher, Tony Adams, Stuart Pearce, Paul Ince and Alan Shearer all seemed to possess the leadership qualities. Jamie Redknapp, Gareth Southgate, Teddy Sheringham, David Platt and Peter Beardsley displayed the intelligence as players but not one of them has made the jump.

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Some have been denied the opportunity, some have had the chance but not taken it and others have contented themselves with a place in the television studio analysing others. When Neville unclipped his pundit's microphone and took on the challenge of delivering success to one of Spain’s most demanding set of supporters it was a ballsy Olé in the face of those who think Englishmen invented football but have contributed nothing to its evolution since.

If Neville fails to beat Espanyol and the Mestalla sends him home to think again, it will reinforce that idea. Hopefully for perhaps the first time since he took over last December fortune will favour the brave on Saturday.