If you can’t swim, blame the swimming trunks...

“It is impossible to escape the feeling that at some point not far away – perhaps even tomorrow – Capello will pick up the phone to Umbro and say: ‘I’ve just lost a reasonably important game of football, and basically I’ve checked all other possibilities and it’s come down to the shirt.’
He would have a point. One can only observe, yet again, how perfectly good, even excellent players seem automatically to malfunction the minute they don the accursed garment. The England shirt is the precise opposite of a superhero costume, turning men with extraordinary abilities into mild-mannered guys next door. Were Stephen Fry to pull it on, he would be struggling to string a sentence together. Were Lucian Freud to slip it over his head he would turn his easel round to reveal a childlike scribble of a cat. Psychological meltdown is now part of the warp and weft of its wretched fibres […].”

Marina Hyde, In the absence of a better excuse we could blame Umbro, The Guardian 19 June 2010, Sports, p.5