There are almost exactly nine months between now and the first match of the 2010 World Cup finals but optimism about England’s chances in a major football tournament never needs a period of gestation. It bursts upon us, fully formed, at the moment of qualification. By the time the big show gets under way in Johannesburg on June 11 next year, expectation will be a bellowing, voracious monster. That’s natural enough and pretty harmless, too, since the last man likely to be affected by the clamour of exhortation and advice is Fabio Capello.

When it suits his purposes as manager of the national squad, he dons insularity like an opinion-proof balaclava. He clearly pays strictly limited attention to any views on how England should play expressed by the footballers in his charge, and none at all to those of the press and the public, which is precisely how it should be. People in my trade often treat men in his job as if they had been elected to serve a nationwide constituency (and therefore might be regarded as answerable to journalists as the fans’ representatives), and some of Capello’s recent predecessors seemed meekly to acquiesce in that daft presumption. But everything he does is a reminder that the reality is entirely different. He was hired at huge expense as an expert specialist and rightly assumes untrammelled authority will be a given so long as he delivers success on the field.

Whereas Graham Taylor, whose father was a sportswriter, gave the impression of imagining he could benefit from a friendly relationship with the media, and Sven-Göran Eriksson and Steve McClaren sought to make cosiness a theme of their regimes, especially in the dressing room, Capello has a healthy disdain for the notion of courting the approval of players or pressmen. He operates according to the most basic truth of the manager’s existence: that his only reliable allies are good scorelines. With them on his side, a manager is largely impregnable. Without them, his efforts at gaining popularity will yield nothing better than a sympathetic smile or two on the way out.

In presiding over the quickest, smoothest and most goal-laden qualifying campaign ever enjoyed by England — maximum points from eight matches, culminating in the 5-1 battering of Croatia at Wembley in midweek, booked the passage to South Africa with two fixtures to spare — Capello’s most impressive achievement may have been the demonstration of how swiftly ridiculously rich, previously overindulged footballers can be brought to their senses by the behave-or-begone imperiousness of somebody who leaves them in no doubt he knows more about their business than they do.

It is to the credit of the most influential members of the squad that they have reacted so positively to the obliteration of the pseudo-egalitarian culture they were encouraged to inhabit under Eriksson and, even more blatantly, McClaren, to the supplanting of all the cringe-inducing chumminess implicit in managerial references to Stevie G, JT and Becks with an uncompromising emphasis on the necessity of recognising that one man rules and the others obey. Of course, simple fear of the career consequences of displeasing Capello must have contributed substantially to the ready acceptance of the new conditions. But that doesn’t totally explain the transformation.

The iron-hard discipline couldn’t have worked as well if those subjected to it hadn’t identified a convincing strategy to improve their performances. However inclined they may be to embrace comfort when it’s on offer, most players crave genuine, creative leadership. They are willing to absorb the harshness of its demands if it raises their capacity to apply their talents. That’s why so many were eager to put up with the abrasive peculiarities of Brian Clough. Once, when it was suggested he had been disrespectful to the most acclaimed individual among Nottingham Forest’s European champions, the superlative goalkeeper Peter Shilton, Clough told me: “I take away their phoney pride and give them real pride.”

Though Capello shows not a trace of Cloughie’s self- confessed tendency to belittle, the ratio of professional pride to celebrity vanity has altered decisively in the England camp since the Italian’s arrival. The combination of his authoritarian temperament and the analytical skills he honed while amassing a distinguished record of accomplishment in the club football of Italy and Spain and in the Champions League has proved the ideal prescription for the ailing state in which poor, out-of-his-depth McClaren left the country’s football fortunes. From personnel selection to tactics to man- management, there has been consistent proof of rationally based conviction. Now the cadre of undeniably outstanding players at Capello’s disposal — Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand, Ashley Cole, Steven Gerrard and John Terry are the obvious halfdozen — can be sanguine about their prospects of functioning within a perceptively chosen and painstakingly organised team that will be supervised and, if necessary modified, through the most pressurised of matches with clinical coherence.

Perhaps it is patriotic exaggeration of such evidence that has produced the weight of money responsible for persuading the majority of bookmakers to refuse to price England above 6-1 in the World Cup betting. Having them just a point-and-a-half longer than the winners of Euro 2008, Spain, who beat them with ease in a friendly earlier this year, seems scarcely objective. Brazil, currently supporting the genius of Kaka and the outrageously prolific goal-scoring of Luis Fabiano with an overall sense of fluent athleticism and power, also appear sure to be dangerous.

But elsewhere there is nourishment for English confidence. The Portugal of Cristiano Ronaldo, the France of Thierry Henry and Franck Ribery and the Argentina of Lionel Messi are all scrabbling, with varying degrees of hopefulness, to qualify for the finals. Argentina, of course, are managed by a reputation, Diego Maradona, and France by the recidivist eccentric Raymond Domenech. Fabio Capello looks more precious by the minute.

Bowled over by Budd brilliance

There was a memorial gathering in Manhattan yesterday to honour a treasured friend of mine. It was the merest footnote to Budd Schulberg’s distinctions that he was as true an aficionado of boxing as ever sat at ringside. If his achievements had been confined to writing the novels What Makes Sammy Run?, The Disenchanted and The Harder They Fall and the screenplay for On the Waterfront his legacy as a creative artist would have been formidable. But there was a great deal more that made his 95 years on the planet extraordinary. He was a flesh and blood archive of so much that was culturally, socially and politically significant in the 20th century, and distant events were rendered vivid by a towering intelligence and an intellectual precision age never eroded.

Of course, many will recall with bitterness that, as an ex-Communist, he named names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the McCarthy era. However, having talked with him often about the experience of being caught between the horrors of artistic oppression and inhuman hypocrisy he had suffered in the US Communist Party (where there was a flat refusal to discuss the disappearance of writer friends in the USSR) and the monstrous apparatus of the McCarthy witchhunt, my feeling was always of a good and liberal-spirited man trapped in a hideous dilemma.

I cherish the times I spent with Budd across 40 years — in New York and London, at his homes on Long Island and Martha’s Vineyard, or in far-flung outposts of the strange and compelling world of boxing that we both found irresistible. Whether the subject was writers or fighters, he stirred the mind and warmed the heart. His friendship was one of the supreme privileges of my life.

A losing Formula

With Formula One racing’s fundamental credibility as a sport already jeopardised in the eyes of many of us by the impossibility of denying that the cars are overwhelmingly more important than the drivers in determining outcomes on the track, it could do without the recurring evidence that in the world of the roaring machines morality is no more than an optional luxury. The scandal of industrial espionage was bad enough. But the latest controversy — the allegation by Nelson Piquet Jr that his Renault team ordered him, as a matter of strategy, to crash his car into a barrier and the countering claim from the Renault F1 boss, Flavio Briatore, that Piquet is a liar and blackmailer — is infinitely worse. If motor racing still has a reputation for fair play, it’s running on empty.