Live by Troussier, die by Troussier.

All the old specters which the optimists might have thought exorcised by Japan's group stage triumphs returned with a vengeance. As the Good Book says, "When an evil spirit leaves a man, it travels through arid places seeking rest, but does not find it, and returns to find the house swept clean and put in order. Then it takes seven spirits more wicked than itself and lives there, and the final condition of the man is worse than before."

The original ghost - which haunted Japan even before Troussier, of course - was a weakness of resolve and mental toughness. Though Troussier seemed to have banished this with his White Witch Doctor voodoo, in fact it merely took a stroll through the dark side of his sprawling ego and marshalled a few friends to bring to the party. And the Frenchman welcomed them home to gorge themselves on Turkey, leaving Japan's fans with permanent indigestion.

Some introductions are in order; please meet the Seven Deadly Sins of Troussier:

Pride: Needless to say. It has been obvious from the very beginning that Troussier has no interest in developing Japanese football beyond the glory that might accrue to Troussier thereby. And the ignorant masses in the stands have fed his ego with their ridiculous cries of "To-ru-shi-e Nip-pon." The most galling moment of the loss to Turkey was long after the final whistle, when the fans gave the Frenchman one final ovation with this wrongheaded cheer, although he had practically conceded the match when he announced his starting lineup.

Rigidity: Troussier's confidence in his own abilities, as unshakeable as it is unfounded, led him to regard his system as a panacea. Rather than adopting a system that would maximize the talent available to him, he imposed the system and sought to jam the players into it (Nakata K.), discarding them if they resisted (Nakamura), or to find players that fit it regardless of their level of ability (Itou). Players who were obviously incompatible with the system were never even given a look (Narahashi, Araiba) regardless of their potential contribution. The loss to Turkey has been admirably diagnosed in this regard by Steve Harris, who saw that Troussier could not even visualize removing a defender for an attacker late in the match because it did not fit his system.

Contempt: Troussier came in with a low opinion of Japanese football, and he was not going to allow the facts to disprove him. His contempt for the J-League sabotaged any possibility of meaningful collaboration on player development, and led him to push players into needless and foolish ventures with foreign clubs at the worst possible time, Inamoto being the prime case. Ono's time in Holland appears to have markedly strengthened his defensive capabilities, but the price paid in squelching his unique creativity was too high.

Blindness: Surely there has never been a manager so completely unable to make objective evaluations of the performance of players on the pitch as Troussier. Rarely did his selections or substitutions bear any visible relationship with players' actual contributions. Instead he used abstract criteria such as whether they followed his instructions. The removal of Alex and the leaving on of Nishizawa against Turkey were absolutely classic cases, as was the complete ignoring of Ogasawara until the very eve of the Cup. As with many of Troussier's sins, they were magnified at the youth level, where less public scrutiny gave him and his copycat cronies like Nishimura an even freer hand. How many own goals would Haneda have needed to score before getting benched? Would a hat trick have done it?

Manipulation: Troussier's idea of player motivation was to create FUD: fear, uncertainty and doubt. This is a classic failure in the literature of business management, and everyone who has ever had a lousy boss at the office will understand exactly how Troussier works. His colossally flawed idea was that you get the best out of people by emotionally abusing them instead of encouraging and uplifting them. All the classic symptoms go with it: playing favorites, sudden, unpredictable shifts in attitude, public criticism. This strategy failed most noticeably with Nakamura, whose absence from Japan's squad was unquestionably a major factor in their loss to Turkey.

Capriciousness: When a manager is utterly convinced of his own infallibility, it tempts him to take outrageous decisions to demonstrate his cleverness, or simply to show who's boss. If they go wrong, it is easy to blame the players. Troussier played out this plot over and over, not least in the long series of experiments on the very cusp of the Cup which hindered the cohesion of the starting unit, but Japan-Turkey will be recalled as the classic case of a foolish gambit that failed, when he benched Suzuki and Yanagisawa for Nishizawa and Alex. Refusing to play Hiroyama when the crowd was chanting for him against Paraguay will always be recalled as Troussier's most mean-spirited moment.

Stubbornness: The true egoist will always throw good money after bad, and never cut his losses, because to admit that one erred is intolerable. Troussier is the ultimate egoist, and with Japan he clung over and over again to players and strategies which were being chewed up and spit out down on the pitch. When he doubled down on Nishizawa against Turkey, it was the classic move of the foolish gambler, who is determined to win it all back on one more throw of the dice.

An epitaph for Troussier's reign, from the Book of Proverbs:

"See you a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him."

and

"Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."