So sleeping tablets are to blame for England’s lethargic performance yesterday. Riiiiight.

Why were England so poor in Poland yesterday? Turns out some of their players had been taking swigs from the bottle of Dreamy Sleepy Nighty Snoozey Snooze.

We’ve heard of some p*ss poor excuses for shoddy performances in the past – Manchester United’s grey jerseys and Kenny Dalglish claiming that the balls “were too bouncy” to explain a defeat to Stevenage during his time as Newcastle manager are two of our personal favourites – and the England football team have added to that list with a pretty abject explanation for their below-par performance in Poland yesterday.

To be fair, none of the players or management have used it as an excuse, but practically all of the English papers this morning have pointed out that a number of the English team had to take sleeping pills to put them to sleep on Tuesday night.

According to The Guardian, the late postponement of the game threw the players pre and post-match routines into chaos and, still feeling the effects of caffeine pills they had taken for an energy injection before the game, several of the squad took sleeping pills to get some shut-eye on Tuesday night and were still feeling the effects on Wednesday afternoon.

Combined with the heavy conditions on the pitch due to all the rain, it all added up to what was an incredibly lethargic display with Roy Hodgson’s men lucky to escape with a draw by all accounts.

If all those factors were to blame, skipper Steven Gerrard wasn’t having any of it.

"We're playing at the top level and we had to get ourselves up for this, but I didn't think we were totally at the races,” he said.

“I slept fine. I won't use the delay and conditions as an excuse. The reason we didn't win was because we didn't pass it when we went in front.”

Whatever the English lads were taking, it obviously wasn’t half as strong as the stuff in the clip below. If they had taken that, they’d be out for days.