The under-whelming, expensive, spin-driven reign of a man promoted out of his depth to fatally guide England's football fortunes ended on Thursday when the FA board handed him his P45.
From day one, it was an appointment that had the pungent smell of compromise and eventual failure about it.
McClaren was Sven-Goran Eriksson's henchman in the under-achieving years of what we now know to be the laughingly-labelled "Golden Generation" of English talent.
The hand of McClaren was on the body of England's failures at major tournaments - so he was never the man to succeed the Swede.
And yet, with a curious mixture of accident and very little design, he breezed into London as England's new coach on 4 May last year.
Chief executive Brian Barwick drew mockery when he proclaimed he had landed his first choice, particularly after a very public courtship of Portugal coach Luiz Felipe Scolari had ended in an equally public rejection.
