While the football public of 16 countries dream of seeing their national team crowned champions of Europe at the end of June, the English are invited to work themselves into a lather of excitement about Fabio Capello’s deliberations over choosing a captain for his squad. As a substitute drama, it is a touch short of riveting, little more than a reminder that headline-writers must keep earning a crust when the England players have been forced to take a holiday.

Picking the right man to provide leadership on the pitch, and to establish a productive relationship with the manager, is clearly important. But the breathless chronicling of the current selection process is out of all proportion to any effect on the future success or failure of Capello’s teams that the appointment is likely to have. Having settled on personnel, the Italian will naturally be the sole architect of formations, strategies and tactics, and as a conduit of his intentions the man with the armband will have negligible autonomy in those areas. That’s the norm in football, where there is nothing remotely equivalent to the traditional input of the captain in cricket, for whom the arrangement of the batting order, the calculated use of bowlers and cooperation with them in the deployment of fielders are just a few of the obvious means of steering the course of the action. Admittedly, in that game, too, the authority of coaches now reaches persistently on to the field and it would be difficult these days to imagine circumstances in which somebody like Mike Brearley, whose playing talents made him at best a borderline candidate for Test duties, became a fixture for England because of the value placed on his cerebral capacities and gift for captaincy. But the temptation to cap a player on the basis of such priorities has never existed in professional football. There no captain could ever be expected to come close to the comprehensive but indirect impact Brearley was frequently credited with exerting on the outcome of matches. Those filling the role are significant mainly as example-setters, as islands of reassurance in times of crisis and, in some remarkable instances, as symbols of the football values to which the group around them aspires.

That latter distinction has inevitably been rare, since it is virtually restricted to individuals whose standard of skill bears comparison with the best in the team, but it was certainly achieved by outstanding figures such as Franz Beckenbauer (for Bayern Munich and West Germany), Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini (in both cases for Milan and Italy) and Bobby Moore (for West Ham and England). Even among that elite, Beckenbauer was the only one who gave the impression that he might have felt independent enough, amid the demands of a competitive international, to make substantial tactical adjustments on the park without waiting for the approval from the sidelines of his manager.

It is occasionally claimed that Moore was similarly empowered on the way to the World Cup triumph of 1966 but neither the testimony of his teammates nor the vivid memory of Alf Ramsey’s nature lends credence to that view. As a character and a performer on the pitch, Moore’s impressiveness rivalled Beckenbauer’s but the Englishman’s alliance with Ramsey was much further from being a partnership of equals than that forged by the Kaiser with Helmut Schoen, who combined a quiet mastery of his job with a responsive, open-minded disposition.

Though Ramsey’s buttoned-down temperament did not prevent him from showing admiration and respect and even, now and then, warm affection for his players, in his code the manager was always he who must be obeyed. No captain of his could have been as influential as Beckenbauer apparently was. And Capello’s history indicates that, notwithstanding his association with on-field leaders as formidable as Baresi and Maldini, he would be inclined to favour the autocratic ways of his distant predecessor. To my mind, that would be healthy, especially as an antidote to the egofest engendered in the England squad by the matey indulgence of recent managers.

Of course Capello will want an inspiring captain but he knows that no one figurehead, however imposing, can ensure the development of stout morale and winning attitudes. That, self-evidently, requires the presence of a clutch of players with strength of personality and an appetite for responsibility. The number of men advanced in the sports pages as legitimate contenders for the captaincy might suggest the necessary core of stalwarts is already on hand. But Capello may question the worth of the advocacy when he notes that the list headed by John Terry, Rio Ferdinand, Steven Gerrard and Gareth Barry has been extended by some to include Michael Owen, whose long-term prospects of holding his position among the rank and file must be less than rock-solid. David Beck-ham’s comeback as captain against Trinidad and Tobago tonight will, surely, be a token restoration in a token fixture, a celebrity turn in a match that has no purpose other than the wooing of support for the English bid to stage the 2018 World Cup finals.

If there is a sense of meaning-lessness in the Caribbean, it will scarcely distinguish the occasion from last Wednesday night’s 2-0 defeat of the United States at Wembley. Capello was quoted somewhere as saying the Americans looked bad because England made them look bad. No. They looked bad because they were bad, technically poor and lacking anything that could be mistaken for imagination or creativity. David James could have set up a table and chair in his goalmouth and started on his newspaper column without fear of having his concentration seriously disturbed. Alternatively, he might have compiled a catalogue of potential England captains. Everybody else seems to be doing it.

Ryder Cup not a major hurdle

Common sense can be an incendiary commodity. Jack Nicklaus was accused of provoking controversy last week with comments on the Ryder Cup that struck me as rational, balanced and entirely unexceptionable. “It’s a great event,” he said. “Is it different? Absolutely it’s different. Is it exciting? Absolutely it’s exciting. But it’s a goodwill event. It’s for bragging rights. I think the US Open or The Masters or the British Open offer a little bit more than bragging rights.”

European golfers justifiably take huge pride in their recent record in the Ryder Cup, having won five of the last six contests against American opponents who gave every indication of being desperate to beat them. But how can anybody reasonably question Nicklaus’s assertion that participating in such team victories means far less than capturing a major championship? Solo endeavour, the individual against the course, is so much the inviolable essence of golf that team play can never be more than an entertaining elaboration of its fundamentals, something the winner of 18 majors was always entitled to treat as an enjoyable diversion from the serious business of making himself an immortal of the game. Are there any of our players who wouldn’t swap their Ryder Cup heroics for one of those big-four championships? If the answer is yes, perhaps that helps to explain why in 53 majors played since 1995 (when the present sequence of Ryder Cup humiliations for America began) there have been just four European triumphs.

Peerless O’Brien

The best of the thoroughbreds pounding down the Epsom hill to Tattenham Corner on Saturday won’t deserve a fraction of the acclaim due to the frail 91-year-old man who will be the guest of honour at the 2008 Derby.

Having saddled six winners of the great race is merely part of the vast fabric of achievement that has caused Vincent O’Brien to be recognised by the most authoritative judges as the 20th century’s supreme trainer of both Flat and National Hunt horses.

A number of lengthy, one-to-one conversations with Vincent over the years left me with the exhilarating, slightly eerie realisation that I had been talking to somebody who was probably better at his job than anyone else who ever lived. Epsom should rise to an incomparable genius.