Kevin Keegan saved the most devastating blow to the last as rag-bag England beat a humiliating retreat from Euro 2000.

'I will not quit and I will not change,' he pronounced, with shameful disregard for the manner in which the inadequacies of his coaching and tactical acumen had been indecently exposed.

It beggars belief that Keegan, far from berating his players for their ineptitude and confessing his own shortcomings, should offer such a postcript to the embarrassing campaign.

Forget the inescapable fact that England were outplayed in a sham-bolic performance against Romania on Tuesday night. Keegan claimed that had they somehow salvaged the draw required to reach the quarterfinals, he felt they could have won the tournament.

'Deep down, I was thinking during that game we were capable of stepping up from what we had produced before to play against Italy in the quarter-final and then we would have been two games away from winning it,' he said.

'I honestly believed we would still have had a great chance of winning Euro 2000. I'm sorry, I won't change on that.'

Neither, it seems, is the deluded Keegan prepared to alter any other fundamental aspect of his thinking on team selection, tactics and his inherent conviction that blind faith will ultimately triumph, whether in a hand of cards or a collection of footballers.

'I am an optimist,' he proclaimed. 'I do not surround myself with people who see the dark side of everything. That is me and I will never change. That is my personality. That is the way I am in life.

'Because things have not worked out in Euro 2000 there has got to be a change of a kind. I have 10 weeks to think about it before our next game, the friendly against France.

'I am not going to say I will be making five or six changes. It is not the end of the line as far as I am concerned for David Seaman, Tony Adams and Paul Ince. I want to doubly underline that fact. I don't think any one of them is about to say: "I've had a good run, so thank you very much".

'I know we have to look to the future but that cannot be done so much when you are trying to qualify for a World Cup. It has to be done in stages. There are a lot of things we have to do better. We have to learn to play the ball out from the back for a start, whether it is from 4-4-2 or 3-5-2.'

The brutal truth is that despite much tub-thumping about the potential emergence of young talent, the actual number ready for examination at the highest level is worryingly limited.

West Ham's Rio Ferdinand, Ipswich goalkeeper Richard Wright and Michael Bridges of Leeds, perhaps, with Upton Park's other promising twosome, Joe Cole and Michael Carrick, still some way short.

The limitations at Euro 2000 were underlined again yesterday when UEFA's technical department revealed that David Beckham was the only England player selected among their top 50 performers at the tournament.

Equally depressing is the realisation that, unlike former England coaches Terry Venables and, to some extent, Glenn Hoddle, the effervescent Keegan falls flat when required to fashion the best from the resources available to him.

He is a motivator, yes, but not a mastermind. There was no shortage of physical effort or commitment in Euro 2000 but when the chips were down, the coach and his cohorts did not have a clue how to rectify the situation.

The whispers have started again that the anxious FA are considering the appointment of a top-line coach, possibly foreign, to offer technical assistance.

But the headstrong Keegan has studiously refrained from consultation with Howard Wilkinson, Lancaster Gate's technical supremo, throughout Euro 2000 and would not take kindly to anybody being forced upon him.

He would surely have been advised that midfield reinforcement was vital against Portugal and Romania, when precious goals to the good were squandered.

It looked as though Keegan had learned a lesson by introducing Steven Gerrard to hang on to the slender 1-0 lead over Germany eight days ago.

Alas, England's first tournament triumph over the Germans since the World Cup Final of 1966 was a bit like Manchester City beating Manchester United, only to be relegated in the same season.