Roy Hodgson was thinking like a coach when he wrote down the name of Javier Mascherano as his No1 pick for this year’s Ballon d’Or. And the many who derided his choice – including former players in the media as well as journalists and fans – are, to sanitise a phrase used in similar circumstances by Sir Alex Ferguson, all idiots.

More specifically, Hodgson was thinking like the man who is paid to coach the England team. So he wasn’t out to lavish his votes on glamour boys such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Leo Messi, who once again claimed the top two positions. Instead he voted for those who, out of all the players in the world, would make the biggest difference to his own team: Mascherano, followed by Philipp Lahm and Manuel Neuer.

These are not men who dismantle defences to score the sort of goals you can look at over and over again. They are the ones who stop that happening, so that the Ronaldos and Messis in their own team can do their stuff. The annual choice of the voters, 544 football professionals around the world, consistently fails to recognise that the game is made up of more than one dimension. Although Neuer made it to the final three this year, there was never a chance that the man who imbued his Germany team-mates with the sense of security that allowed them to win the World Cup last summer would prevail over a losing finalist and a man whose team did not make it past the group stage.

If I were the Football Association, his employers, or an England fan, I would be delighted by this evidence of Hodgson’s secure sense of priorities, and that he can see beyond the absurd scoring statistics compiled by the two best forwards in the chronically unbalanced Spanish first division. He is a thoughtful man who takes his responsibilities seriously, including the task of voting in the Ballon d’Or poll. And look where it got him.

One incident this week exemplified the sort of difficulties faced by the England manager. The Premier League clubs managed to block his little plan – unwisely leaked to the media a few weeks ago – for a dinner with his squad to break the long gap between their last match, against Slovenia on 15 November, and their next one, against Lithuania on 27 March.

Four months of inactivity must seem interminable for a manager more used to the day to day activity of club football. It seems wholly reasonable that he would want to gather his players together, to help them build and retain a sense of teamship.

The humorist Giles Smith used his Times column to predict the gradual demise of the scheme as the players pulled out one by one, presenting a variety of flimsy excuses and ultimately leaving Hodgson to dine all alone. But Smith was too cautious. The get-together was nixed with a single announcement that failed to disguise the contempt of those who made the decision to withdraw the players’ co-operation.

A disappointed Hodgson will not allow himself to be deflected from the job of making tactical and selectorial plans for Euro 2016, and his choice of Mascherano can be taken as an indication of what he believes England are missing.

In most of today’s best teams, the defensive midfield player – or whatever you want to call him – is the key position around which the rest are assembled. If Mascherano plays at centre-back for Barcelona, that is because the club have a decent alternative in his usual position and are short of authoritative central defenders who can also distribute the ball. But he continues to play at the base of midfield for Argentina, and it was there that he gave one of the outstanding individual performances of the World Cup when Holland were stifled in the semi-final.

It was not Mascherano’s fault that his country so narrowly lost the final. He had built the platform. The forwards, including Messi, failed to exploit it (although had Ángel di María not succumbed to injury, Argentina might well have won and we would not now be lavishing quite so much praise on German football).

Mascherano’s attributes, like those of Claude Makelele, are different from those of Messi and Ronaldo, but just as difficult to acquire and perhaps even harder to maintain season after season. They include perception, anticipation, unselfishness, courage, physical tenacity and a shrewd appreciation of how far the rules of the game can be stretched. Such a player, like Makelele at Real Madrid and Chelsea, might never bring the crowd to their feet, but he will earn the profound respect and gratitude of his team-mates.

He will also be awfully hard to replace, as Liverpool discovered after Mascherano’s departure for Barcelona. The difference between the Anfield club’s results this season, before and after the decision to recall Lucas Leiva, as my colleague Andy Hunter pointed outon Friday, emphasises the point. At Stamford Bridge, a wholly convincing solution to Makelele’s exit in the summer of 2008 did not emerge until the return of Nemanja Matic in January 2014. Arsenal have never recovered from discarding Gilberto Silva seven years ago. And Ferguson’s worst gift to his successors at Manchester United was the decision to let Paul Pogba go.

The English league once specialised in breeding the predecessor of the species: the midfield destroyer, incarnated by Nobby Stiles, Peter Storey and Norman Hunter. No longer. The young talents finding their way into Hodgson’s midfield division tend to come primarily equipped for the more creative tasks, like Adam Lallana and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain among the present bunch, or such potential future stars as James Ward-Prowse and Patrick Roberts.

Making a player adapt to the job seldom works, particularly at international level. Steven Gerrard was uncomfortable in a primarily defensive role. Jack Wilshere looks effective there only when facing inferior opposition. Of those who did appear to fit the specification, Fabrice Muamba’s career sadly came to a premature halt while others – such as Jack Rodwell, whose progress has been handicapped by injuries, and Nathaniel Chalobah – have failed to train on.

If there is any vision among the FA coaches at St George’s Park, they will be identifying such players and devising a special course to develop the skills in question. The unhelpful attitude of the Premier League clubs, who tend to fill those gaps by looking to places such as Serbia, Holland and the Ivory Coast, won’t change. But at least we know, thanks to his willingness not to follow the Ballon d’Or herd, that Roy Hodgson gets the point.