On the Premiership: Forget bird flu. The biggest threat to England's health at the moment is not the ghastly viruses carried by our feathered friends, but PST - Post-Sven Tension.

It is a rare, but unpleasant, condition, causing victims to suffer bouts of uncontrollable hysteria at the prospect of replacing Sven-Goran Eriksson as England manager. Everyone has a dose: the press, the clubs and the ever-dwindling list of candidates tipped to replace the Swede after the World Cup finals in July.

Indeed, only Sven himself has remained immune: then again, with his salary he would need a good reason not to wear a smile as he goes about doing whatever national managers do when they are not (a) watching games, (b) preparing for games, or (c) being paid £18,500 to travel to Shanghai instead of watching or preparing for games.

The good news is PST does have a cure, namely appointing a replacement.

Unfortunately this is proving rather harder than anticipated. The "race" to become Sven's successor has officially become a marathon rather than a sprint, although the protagonists are unchanged. There is Steve McClaren (the front-runner), Martin O'Neill (the chaser), Alan Curbishley (the outsider), Sam Allardyce (the puffed-out trundler) and Luis Felipe Scolari (the bloke at the back staggering under the weight of his Pink Panther costume).

However, the problem with marathons - as anyone who got up at 8am to watch London's 26-mile extravaganza yesterday can confirm - is the initial buzz of excitement which accompanies the start soon dissipates.

Eventually, the contest becomes predictable and finally downright dull.

And so it is with the England managerial saga. The whole painful process has been going on so long - three months ago to the day, to be precise - we are starting to run out of things to say.

Newspapers eager for a new angle on who should replace the unloved Eriksson are turning to some unlikely and, frankly, irrelevant characters for a fresh perspective: one Sunday paper ran a splash on the views of the former Middlesbrough and Brazil midfielder Juninho yesterday, who unsurprisingly plumped for Scolari.

Gareth Southgate, meanwhile, has declared that his Boro manager McClaren is "not ready" for England, which should ensure a few awkward moments at training tomorrow.

Enough is enough. It is time to bring an end to all the talk and conjecture and come to a decision.

Not for the sake of the newspapers - if there is one thing editors enjoy more than getting an England manager the sack, it is speculating over who should replace him - but for the clubs and coaches who have been left in limbo by the prevarication.

Is it any coincidence that the fortunes of Allardyce's Bolton and Curbishley's Charlton have slumped dramatically since Eriksson announced his intention to quit? Allardyce has remained fairly quiet on the subject of succession, perhaps because he fears he is now the rank outsider, but Curbishley put it neatly last week when he suggested that his season had been "hijacked".

Of course, if Curbishley is upset by the level of media attention now, he should probably not have applied for the second most scrutinised job in the country, after the prime minister's. But he had a point: it cannot be easy to motivate and cajole players who know that their manager could, at any moment, jump ship for HMS Soho Square and unsettled squads do not generally achieve as they should.

The biggest losers of all are the managers themselves. Allardyce and Curbishley's England ambitions have both been severely dented by their clubs' stuttering form. The same is true of Stuart Pearce, once genuinely touted as a dark horse, now dismissed as a lame duck after Manchester City's dreadful run of six straight league defeats.

The only men to have emerged unscathed since the rumour mill whirred into action are O'Neill and McClaren. The Derryman cannot be a hostage to his club's fortunes as he has spent the last year caring for his sick wife Geraldine. His stock is as high now as it was when he left Celtic last summer and that should count in his favour, although there will inevitably be doubts over a man who has not managed in England since 2000.

McClaren, meanwhile, has enjoyed the most turbulent ride of all. It wasn't so long ago the Middlesbrough manager was a laughing stock and being pelted with season-tickets by disgruntled supporters. Then, in the space of a couple of months, his side shot away from relegation danger and into two cup semi-finals.

We might all have been put out of our misery had Boro grasped glory but West Ham closed one route yesterday and Steaua Bucharest hold a 1-0 advantage going into the second leg of the Uefa Cup semi-final this week.

The gloss has again been rubbed off McClaren's reputation, so the marathon goes on.