ENGLAND’S loss is Swindon Town’s gain. New Town boss David Flitcroft got down to the last four – from 165 applicants – for the job of national U21s coach.

During his down time since being sacked in November by Bury, he has also worked for three months on player recruitment for Craig Shakespeare at Leicester City, and he has recently been in the States weighing up the possibility of working for the North American Football Confederation.

But this week he described the Swindon Town job as ‘the opportunity I have been waiting for’.

And after the rudderless mumbo jumbo of ‘head coaches’ and ‘directors of football’, Town have come clean and appointed the Northerner as ‘manager’.

Flitcroft is undoubtedly well qualified for the job of getting newly-relegated Swindon out of the bottom tier.

He has guided sides out of League Two twice in five years, firstly when assistant to Keith Hill at Rochdale in 2010 and then as his own man with Bury in 2015.

Between those two successes he achieved arguably a more challenging feat, keeping Barnsley in the Championship in 2013 after taking over from the sacked Hill with the team firmly in the relegation zone.

The great escape included wins over Burnley, Leicester, Watford and Hull – all of whom became Premiership clubs.

In his first interview with BBC Wiltshire from the States, Flitcroft gave the firm impression that he likes to be a man in full control.

It was he that gave the chairman a list of questions, essentially on player recruitment and style of football, that Lee Power took two weeks to answer.

It seemed a case of Flitcroft doing due diligence on Power and Swindon Town rather than vice versa.

He sounds like a man who will brook no interference in player recruitment, an area in which even Power has now admitted his inadequacies over the last season or two.

“I’m very detailed in my planning,” said Flitcroft. “I don’t have a philosophy on football, I have a methodology and a method of how I win games. Bringing a winning mentality back to Swindon Town and putting pride back into performances are the two key aspects I will be working on.”

And in one sentence he tore up the Power/Luke Williams/Tim Sherwood blueprint of using technically accomplished but untried young footballers, who as it turned out were manifestly unfit for the task.

“League Two is about men’s football,” said the man known as ‘Flicker’, and he later insisted he would be building a ‘robust team’.

Two short phrases but ones that might bring 500 to 1,000 disillusioned Town fans – driven away by ineffective tippy-tappy football – back to the County Ground, yours truly among them.

That’s does not mean we are going to be served Neanderthal football, Barnsley and Bury were both passing teams, after all.

Some see Flitcroft inheriting a squad of just 10 contracted players and a couple of Academy kids as a negative.

The new gaffer begs to differ, claiming it was a major attraction – he feels he is coming in with a virtual clean slate.

“I’ve got a great knowledge of the lower leagues, I’ve got fantastic contacts and I’m going to utilise them,” he said.

David Flitcroft seems a man unencumbered by doubt.

At some stage it will be good to hear his take on getting sacked by Barnsley and Bury and what happened to his famed winning mentality then.

But for now it looks, after two years of naïve chaos, that it might just be safe to anticipate some passionate, entertaining and, dare I say it, successful football from Swindon Town.

And what price the first loanee coming from Leicester City?