Having a consistent and effective routine in any sport you play at grassroots level is needed to give yourself the best chance of success.

At the very top level this is even more important and you often find that players are regimented in their matchday routines so much so that any break from the norm can have huge consequences on performance.

A Premier League footballer will live his life for the entirety of the season pretty much by a clock. Everything that happens on a daily basis will be done at the exact same time each day, or near enough. If they are training Monday to Friday they have to be at the ground at a certain time and everything from breakfast, to training, to lunch will happen at the same time each day.

When it comes to match days that emphasis on routine doesn't stop. It gets worse.

Players will systematically be preparing for games with pre-match meals at set times, fluids, sleep, pre-match stretching and even massages all happening at the exact same points in the build up to each game. All of the above you might already expect to be happening.

But few people are aware that players will also be relying on sleeping at certain points throughout the day of a game and also for the opposite effect, caffeine tablets.

So when the chaos of England's game was unfolding on Tuesday night in Poland, there will have been one or two worried players. You see, top players rely so heavily on these routines that for every second they are thrown out of it, they are worrying about the effects.

It's time that they are not focusing 100 per cent on their task on the pitch.

Lee Dixon and Roy Keane alluded to this on a number of occasions in the TV studio with both pointing out that these players will have a stack of energy surplus to requirements should the game be called off. You will know yourself that if you have a lot of extra sleep the night before or have a pretty lethargic day, the next night sleeping is often difficult.

Then consider that the players will have taken their routine caffeine tablets to stimulate the brain and with not using up all of this extra energy for 90 minutes as expected, it's a pretty safe bet that there would have been some pretty good games of football being played on the Xbox by the England players late into the night until tiredness crept in.

Players using caffeine supplements are really no different to you choosing to drink one or two cans of an energy drink on the morning of a game. You're just trying to make yourself more alert. If you have your routine energy drink in preparation and your game is called off due to a flood or boggy pitch on a Sunday morning, it's not so bad for you as you will have the rest of the day for the effects to wear off.

But imagine it's 9pm at night, the effects would really throw your sleep pattern.

How important are routines at the very top level? Well, Lewis Hamilton and other Formula One drivers often go the extreme of not changing their body clocks no matter which time zone they are in.

When the Singapore night race comes around, Hamilton will prepare for the race like every other typical morning race. So he sleeps right through the day and wakes in the afternoon, in effect mimicking the routine he is used to at the day races he prepares for most of the time.

Unlike the England footballers favouring the stimulants on Tuesday, Hamilton will more likely need sleeping pills and a blackened out room to help him sleep through the day which means he is wide awake through the night.

So for you or your players at the grassroots level, this week's fiasco in Poland should serve to highlight the importance of keeping your routine.

From rising at the same time each morning, to eating at the same time before you play, your performance on the pitch tomorrow is likely to be significantly better than your opponent who makes his routine up as he goes along, if you stick to yours.