Wally with the brolly is off his trolley

The old adage to smile in the face of adversity could explain why Steve McClaren, the former England manager, wears a grin so fixed it puts Real Madrid's presidential elections to shame.

'Second-Choice Steve', 'The Wally with the Brolly', 'The Smugfather'; whatever you like to call the fallen football coach, it's difficult not to loathe his arrogant demeanour and brazen self-importance.

Take his trip to Dubai last month. Billed as one of the star attractions at the Third International Sports Conference here in the emirate – Cesare Maldini would wince at the very thought – McClaren delivered one of the worst motivational speeches since Colonel Custer's offering at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

No wonder he seemed so lost in the England hotseat.

The congregation of enthusiastic UAE football fellows, who had listened intently to Maldini's thoughts on management in the Middle East, soon dissipated for the chance to have their picture taken with the World Cup outside the conference hall. Even that was a bigger draw.

Poor Steve was due to take the stage and wow them with his "top tips for running a successful club". Successful club? He couldn't even manage a side that only played 18 times in a year and a half. Still, his time at Middlesbrough – where, granted, he won the League Cup and took them to the Uefa Cup final – should have provided the now scattered audience with a few pearls of wisdom.

But Steve wasn't happy. Face giving off that now familiar deep red glow that suggests a man on his manic edge, he paraded the far end of the room, hands behind his back, muttering to himself.

"What would Fabio do?" was probably turning over and over in his head.

But like all great men, he fought on; determined to educate the 30 or so that presumably thought, like myself, they could wait until the queue for the World Cup trophy died down. Then we could snap away at our delight.

McClaren, the new boss at Dutch side FC Twente, opened with a scene from Kes, a 40-year-old British movie that I doubt many in his audience were

familiar with. He carefully chose [I give him the benefit of the doubt here] the excerpt of the pernicious PE teacher Mr Sugden stretching before class and, once the clip finished, joked: "That's a clip of a typical English coach 30 years ago, or schoolteacher as he was then, just to show what coaching was like back then.

"And that's still my little warm-up. Things haven't changed." Cue that beaming grimace, and tumbleweed creeping eerily through the room.

"The presentation I want to give today," he continued nonetheless, "is about my experiences of coaching in a football club, managing a football club, running a football club, running a national team and trying to be successful."

Emphasis on "trying". McClaren may have been semi-successful at club level – he did work with the best players at Manchester United – but his time as national coach was an absolute disaster. Under McClaren, England failed to qualify for a major tournament for the first time since the 1994 World Cup finals.

Indeed, his tenure was the shortest of any of his predecessors, coming swiftly to an end after England's demoralising defeat to Croatia at Wembley last

November. His side needed only a draw to secure a place at Euro 2008, but McClaren seemingly ran out of ideas, and the FA out of patience. Chief Executive Brian Barwick later admitted that the selection process, when they promoted Sven-Goran Eriksson's assistant in May 2006, was flawed.

"The saddest day of my career,"

McClaren professed at the time. Little did he know his talk in Dubai would challenge that. It was all too predictable when his power-point failed him here, just like his players had on November 21.

But, never fear, Steve's been in trouble before… and sank. Grabbing the mic and moving from his stand, the York-born boss took to the stage. "Unfortunately we've lost power," he brilliantly deduced. Filling in frantically, anecdote after anecdote saw McClaren much more animated than he ever was on the touchline.

Arms flailing wildly, jumping from one side of the stage to the other and pointing to people in the crowd, the crazy coach resembled a worn-out quiz-show host who hit the bottle years ago and still thought no one realised.

His analogies grew stranger by the minute; he seemed to have a fixation with different modes of travel. "If you don't have a vision, you are a ship without a rudder; you are going along rudderless," he imparted. "When I joined Middlesbrough I wanted to create a culture. And to create a culture you need to get the right people on the right bus going in the right direction, all in the right seats.

"What do I mean by that?" Tell us Steve, please. "I said to the players we have two buses at Middlesbrough. There's one bus that I'm driving and it's going that way to success. There's another bus going that way, out of this football club. Which way do you want to go? Some of them chose the other bus."

Good on them. I suspect McClaren drove the rest around the bend.

"It's no good being on that bus and all going in that direction if four or five are looking the other direction. Again, there has to be everybody rowing, I mean driving, in the same direction."

So you row buses now Steve, do you? How many drivers are needed to drive a bus? How many McClarens does it take to bore a conference hall? This was more painful than his post-match analysis.

"And you must have the right people in the right seats. It's like having a car salesman who's fantastic at selling cars. He's out there selling cars and is… fantastic. But then he gets a sales director's job sitting behind the desk and he's a disaster."

Much like his talk. The only saving grace was McClaren kept holding the mic below his waist so he continuously faded out; he had less stage presence than Pete Best's drumsticks. At least his torrid time as national coach hasn't affected his confidence, though. "In my third year at Middlesbrough we got into the Carling Cup final," he recalls.

"We were playing at Cardiff and when we came to the stadium there, right in front of the bus, was a 100-foot poster of me. That smacked me right between the eyes and I thought 'woah'. It's sometimes not about the players, the fans or the club. Sometimes it's about you and you're the man." Enough said.

The ridiculed coach revealed that, upon hearing of his dismissal from the England job, he faced the media "head on" and then went to "my sanctuary, my cave" to write a book about his experiences. If only he'd retreat back to that dark cavern now. And if, for some inexplicable reason, we need to find him? I'm sure his titanic Tipp-Exed teeth will give him away.

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