This is the moment at which having a much-decorated Italian in charge of the
England team comes into its own. As John Terry stepped up to the interview
podium, on the occasion of his second coronation as England captain, it
began to dawn on many in the room what a shrewd cookie Fabio Capello has
been. He has kept the same captain that Steve McClaren installed two years
ago, yet somehow contrived to make the appointment seem like his own. He did
not change for the sake of it, nor bow to a budding army of moralists, and
the fact that another England manager, a failed one at that, had the thought
first did not matter a jot. That is what confidence does for you.
Capello has talked at length about his players needing to perform with
assurance under pressure and tonight, against the Czech Republic at Wembley,
we shall see if he has taken that message from the bench to the field of
play. If the self-belief that was so clearly absent during crucial matches
under the previous incumbent, McClaren, is missing again this season,
England may face a fearful reckoning in Croatia next month.
Dismissing such negativity, Capello has already talked of winning in Zagreb —
England would be the first to do so in a competitive match — and tonight’s
performance will chart his progress and reveal whether he is merely
whistling to keep his spirits up or whether, in a matter of months, with
limited access to his players, he has already gone farther in enabling
talented individuals to play with the same bravado they demonstrate at club
level.
There is a
video doing the rounds that highlights what was wrong before. Poor old
McClaren was giving an interview to a Dutch television station, in English,
and working so hard to be liked by his inquisitor that he ended up speaking
his own language in a Dutch accent, coming across like Harry Enfield’s
liberal Amsterdam cop: masshiv underdogsh, fantashtik, yah.
Now we can all laugh at this (indeed, on viewing it is impossible not to),
but, sadly, what is exposed is one of the main reasons McClaren’s European
Championship campaign ended in failure. Knowing that he was an unpopular
choice from the start, he cared too much about what others thought. He
wanted to be liked, he wanted to be appreciated, and as a result probably
suffered from the same confidence issues as his players because he knew what
a losing campaign would mean for his country, and his career.
Talking to him before Arsenal’s match against his new club, FC Twente, last
week, he admitted that failing to qualify for a leading tournament as
England manager as good as made a coach unemployable, short term, in the
Premier League. He was philosophical about this, said it went with the
territory.
Even so, armed with the knowledge, as England stuttered and stumbled through
the qualification process, it cannot have made for an untroubled soul.
Realisation of the dire consequence of failure does not inspire, it
undermines. Avram Grant knew that he had to win the Champions League to keep
his job, and Chelsea’s players say that he was the most nervous figure in
the dressing-room before the final against Manchester United.
McClaren is a foreign manager in the Eredivisie, and financially quite
possibly the best-rewarded coach there, but he is still thinking like a man
with something to prove, who knows that he has to make at least a moderate
success of the position to climb the next rung on the ladder.
Still, he wants to fit in. Capello has no such pressure. Reputation, financial
security, self-esteem: all are intact regardless of whether he turns England
into World Cup winners. If confidence is the missing ingredient in the
national team, he is the best man to build it because he has so much to
spare. Sven-Göran Eriksson did, too. The advantage of appointing the
successful foreign coach, as Chelsea have quickly discovered with Luiz
Felipe Scolari, is the absence of fear. Scolari approaches his work with the
absolute conviction of the proven winner, as does Capello.
If there is a drawback in this arrangement, it will be felt long term, in the
establishment of the principle that only a man with the perfect CV is
capable of inspiring England’s footballers. Other countries work with the
best available from within their system, but the FA has abandoned that
concept and it may be impossible to return to it. Any Englishman that was
even moderately successful in club football would instantly become a target
for the national association, so the elite clubs will surely think twice
about appointing one. Englishmen will therefore not have the track record to
compare with foreign coaches and will be regarded as inferior. Stuart
Pearce, the England Under-21 head coach, may buck this trend if he is
successfully groomed under Capello’s tutelage, but there are no guarantees.
In essence, although nothing in the Fifa rulebook forbids a foreign
appointment, English football is cheating. Clubs are bottom-line businesses
and have no boundaries, but national football aspires to greater meaning,
pitting the wit of one country against another to demonstrate the strength
of its game. Now, if England win the 2010 World Cup it will be as much
Italy’s victory: Italian coaching, Italian knowhow, Italian ideals. By
appointing Capello, instead of solving a problem, English football seeks a
short-cut to the answer. Take two children and a tough mathematics question:
427,649 x 221,952. Give one a pen and a piece of paper and the other a
calculator. The machine has it cracked before the other child has the first
line of calculations written, but given time, who will be better at
arithmetic? Capello is England’s calculator; he gives us an answer we cannot
fathom on our own.
The time for ethical debate has long gone, however, so for now we should just
make the most of it and allow Capello to concentrate on bringing a level of
belief to the national team that would have been unattainable under an
English manager. The captaincy issue has been resolved with the sensible
preservation of the status quo, now the hard work begins.
If anything, perhaps Capello’s only aberration so far has been to become
embroiled in a discussion about an issue that would barely have registered
on the Continent. Terry had done nothing wrong as captain, so why make him
feel he was being punished by taking his title away?
There is a theory that the whole captaincy audition was a handy diversionary
tactic that allowed the manager to iron out wrinkles in his team early on,
while the focus of the media was elsewhere, but this would afford Capello a
devious streak that would trouble the conscience of Machiavelli. More
likely, his employers were partly to blame for the overblown nature of the
issue, particularly a commercial department that craves a marketable
figurehead, and would have been utterly thrown by the Italian concept of
giving the armband to the player with the most caps on a match-by-match
basis (although, in the present squad, the captain would always be David
Beckham, if he started, which would suit it nicely).
The captaincy X Factor that took place last season was incongruous,
considering Capello’s wish for self-assured players as, in the end, either
Terry would have had to be disappointed, or the hopes of a rival such as Rio
Ferdinand or Steven Gerrard would be dashed. In the end, the only change
that Capello made was to swap Ferdinand for Gerrard as Terry’s understudy
and it seems a grand effort for little result. Perhaps Capello was
erroneously advised that the nation placed great emphasis on the role of
captain. The FA, yes, and certainly the media, but had Capello explained how
casually the Italians treat the position, and the many good reasons for
that, he might have been surprised at the level of public acceptance.
Anyway, the great advantage of being a foreign manager — and the one that
McClaren has failed to grasp in his desire to assimilate — is that the
interloper is not tied down by outside opinions. One of the most telling
moments in the documentary about Graham Taylor’s time as England manager is
when he turns to Lawrie McMenemy, his assistant, on the bench and makes a
comment about the action in relation to what Nigel Clarke, of the Daily
Mirror, had written that day. Nigel would no doubt have been secretly
delighted, and amazed, that he was such a significant figure in the thoughts
of the England manager as an important game progressed. One cannot imagine
any football writer receiving a similar endorsement of influence from
Capello. Standing on the touchline, frowning, arms folded, he doesn’t look
much like a man who cares what tomorrow’s headlines will bring.
McClaren learnt too late the lesson Capello knew from the start. What a nation
really wants from its manager is a win, not a winning smile. Setting out his
demands for tonight’s game, Capello announced that he required his team to
play with spirit and without fear, but most of all with a big personality.
He chose not, at that point, to break into The Lambeth Walk, brandish a
black pudding or address anybody in the room as “me old china”. He is
Italian, you see. They do things differently over there.
