The Warm-Up: England 0, Scotland 0, Northern Ireland 0... San Marino 1

Caretaker England boss Gareth Southgate has got his boys playing tournament football already – timid, error-strewn and cowed by apparently unbearable pressure.

If hostage videos could play football, they’d look like England in Ljubljana last night.

So ended a run of 14 consecutive qualifying victories, but it could have been so much worse but for a spectacular goalkeeping performance. Or, as this dreadful but inescapably funny joke put it:

The under-fire Joe Hart was just about the only England player to emerge without credit as life after Wayne Rooney ended up looking a lot like life with him.

Eric Dier, aka the man who killed Bambi, nearly gifted Slovenia the lead with a truly atrocious backpass; then Jordan Henderson, who replaced Rooney as captain, did the same in the second half.

Enter Rooney, immediately taking the armband back from Henderson. The storyline gods begged him to score a dramatic winner. Alas, Rooney doesn’t do goals any more, and the ‘Can Roo Believe It?’ headlines were folded neatly back into their box.

With such dismal fare on the telly, small wonder that the nation’s youth seem more interested in dressing up as clowns and going round scaring the life out of people. Oh, wait a minute...

The one constant in the reigns of Roy Hodgson, Sam Allardyce and Gareth Southgate is that they’ve all had the same underwhelming crop of players to pick from.

So, probably time to change the manager again.

England remain top of group F and appear to have got their two hardest away games out of the way, in Slovenia and Slovakia.

This after Scotland copped an almighty shoeing, losing 3-0 to Slovakia in Trnava.

The country that produced world class defenders like Alan Hansen, Alex McLeish, Willie Miller and Colin Hendry now boasts a central defensive pairing of Grant Hanley and Russell Martin.

Gordon Strachan rarely cuts the cheeriest figure – here he is before the Scotland’s draw with Lithuania at the weekend.

He deadbatted questions about his future last night, but Twitter helpfully converted his answers into more recognisable Strachanese.

There’s every chance Scotland will have a new manager when they visit Wembley next month. Go and get Allardyce. Just do it. It’ll be amazing.

The good thing about having 211 teams in international football is there’s always someone worse off than you.

And so to Norway, who found themselves pegged back to 1-1 by San Marino’s first away goal in 15 years.

Goalscorer Mattia Stefanelli, whose day job appears disappointingly enough to be not butcher, baker or bank manager but ‘footballer’, sent the Sammarinese bench into understandable rapture...

...while over on Norwegian TV...

Adama Diomande saved Norway’s bacon making it 2-1 13 minutes from time and it ended 4-1.

But the night belonged to San Marino, whose amusing unofficial Twitter account knew just where to find the banter.

Indeed, with Northern Ireland going down 2-0 to Germany, San Marino outscored the entire Home Nations.

The Warm-Up has no intention of joining the po-faced condemnation of Paul Pogba for getting lots of different haircuts while simultaneously not being the best footballer in the world, but... aren't those emojis a bit rubbish?

You may well have seen the quotes from Mads Timm’s autobiography about life at Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson.

May we point you in the direction of the source material, which features perhaps the best headline we have ever seen – it’s NSFW-ish and you certainly don’t need to know any Danish to understand it.

The Warm-Up heartily endorses any form of needlessly inflammatory showboating. This wasn’t exactly Andrei Kanchelskis’ salute, and you could argue there are better stages for showing off than South African reserve league – but still, we’ll take our WWE-style tomfoolery however we can get it.

Here are Free State Stars’ Langelihle Ndlovu and Pule Mmodi dabbing during a 3-2 win over Platinum Stars... because, well, why not?

That man's hair deserves a blue plaque...we can’t look at this without spontaneously weeping.

With Steve Bruce set to join Aston Villa today, another call for Seamas O’Reilly’s magnificent review of Brucie’s second novel ‘Sweeper’.

A great interview with Everton’s Oumar Niasse by David Hytner of the Guardian – it’s a genuinely sad reminder that multi-million-pound flops are people too.

There’s more football today – and it’s live on Eurosport!

Chelsea take on Wolfsburg at 17:00 having to overturn a 3-0 deficit from the first leg of their Women’s Champions Leaguelast-32 tie.

Plus we’ve also got action from the quarter-finals of the Women’s U17 World Cup – Mexico v Venezuela at 14:00.