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On Wednesday night, a barely half-full Wembley witnessed a disinterested England in a war of attrition with a dreadfully unambitious Norway.

The exact crowd was a shade over 40,000 – the lowest England have attracted since Wembley opened its doors after being expensively re-fitted in 2009. It was painted as a combination of poor opposition, post-World Cup depression and a Three Lions side without the star name or playing style to capture the headlines.

It was put to Roy Hodgson that his team’s style might be causing the flat-lining attendances and the England manager bit at the questioner. “I think you’ll find we’ll find it hard to bring attendances back to very high levels because of the opponents we’re playing, they won’t be exciting the public,” he said.

“They’re not the teams that normally attract full houses. But if the team works as hard as they did on Wednesday, show the appetite and desire, and the aggression in the defending, show the exciting moves that were there for all to see, they’ll come back.”

Leaving aside for a minute the question of whether Hodgson was watching the same moribund display as the rest of us, he misses a key point in the collapse of support for the England team.

Long before Hodgson took the reins, England had alienated a large area that was once a natural territory for the Three Lions. And no club has greater cause for complaint than Sunderland, the club who – despite being embroiled in far too many relegation scraps for their own good in recent years – provided two of the midfielders that Hodgson had originally picked for his squad.

It is a frustration on Wearside that neither are playing at Sunderland any more. With one, Jordan Henderson, they could do little to prevent the move other than agree what looked like a fair fee with Liverpool and then move on.

With the other, they have cause for complaint with the player and reason to kick themselves for allowing him to leave. Jack Colback remains a festering issue for most Sunderland fans, as does his England call-up.

But what isn’t up for debate is that Sunderland’s Academy has over-achieved in providing two players for England contention. Yet the club itself does not receive the acclaim or support from the Football Association that it should. On the contrary, there has been vocal criticism of Sunderland recently for their approach to youth development.

And this is what the bean counters at Wembley haven’t really factored into the debate about crowds. It is the arrogant and ill-informed attitude of those in positions of power at the FA has that driven away pockets of loyalty in places like Wearside.

In 2003, there was a capacity crowd of 49,000 people at the Stadium of Light to watch England take on Turkey. The Three Lions were in the middle of their successful tour of the country and there was a clamour for tickets. They had already played in front of 51,046 at St James’ Park when Albania visited in a World Cup qualifier in 2001.

There should be questions over whether they would shift as many tickets if England visited again. The reason? England have rarely illustrated a modicum of fairness or a desire to engage with the region.

A personal opinion is that no one with red and white allegiances should put any money into the England machine until the FA chairman Greg Dyke apologises for some spectacularly ill-informed comments last year.

Last September, Dyke had points to make in a keynote speech that preceded him delivering his FA Commission Report. He wanted to emphasise the way the Premier League was strangling opportunities for young English players and alienating those who came to matches.

So he set about finding evidence for his very valid point that only 32% of the Premier League’s starting line-ups during the 2012/13 season were made up of players eligible to play for England.

He announced: “A second example, Sunderland have signed 14 players during the summer transfer window. They are made up of four Italians, three Frenchmen, one Swiss, one Czech, one American, one Greek, one Swede, one South Korean and a sole Englishman.

“In fact in Sunderland’s first game of the season against Fulham there were only four players on the pitch at the start of the game who were actually qualified to play for England.”

Dyke was clearly attempting to make a point but it seemed incredible to pick on one of the Premier League clubs that does take its responsibilities to produce young players seriously.

That is not to condone the madness of the Roberto de Fanti era. The Italian invasion was damaging for all concerned but Sunderland’s Academy endured the pressure placed on it by Paolo Di Canio. It had to.

“We are trying to develop Premier League players here, but we’re also developing men,” Academy manager Ged McNamee said in an interview in the Journal last year. And good players, too, if the example of Henderson and Colback was anything to go by.

When they make it so difficult to follow them, England need to give us reasons to support them. Alienating those who work hard to try and provide Premier League opportunities seems a spectacularly wrong-headed way of doing it.

What Dyke also failed to recognise was that when Sunderland did spend big on an English player – Darren Bent – they found their efforts to retain him were undermined by advice from the then-England manager that moving on would improve his opportunities with the national side.

Was it any wonder that Bent, who had made playing for England in a major tournament one of his career goals, was able to have his head turned when Aston Villa offered him a potential platform that Fabio Capello found more convenient?

It would be in everyone’s best interests if the Three Lions roared again, but they seemed a million miles away from that as a poor game petered into nothingness at a disinterested Wembley. Where now, then? At their lowest ebb, it might be an idea for England to think about starting to build bridges on Wearside again.