A highly respected football writer took the philosophical approach when faced with one of Sven-Göran Eriksson’s more perplexing departures from reason (perhaps he had picked Theo Walcott for the 2006 World Cup finals without seeing him play or decided that, of all the available women in London, he had to pursue the one in David Davies’s office who had Max Clifford on speed dial). Drawing on experience that dated back to Alf Ramsey and 1966, he would offer a barely perceptible shake of the head and declare: “It sends them mad, you know. They all end up like it eventually, even Ron Greenwood.”

Hard to believe the strait-laced Fabio Capello transformed to a gibbering wreck, but give it time. The seeds have been planted. Maybe one day they will bear fruit. This week Capello is in Lesotho, last week it was announced that he had been seconded to the FA’s new Youth Management Group and at the weekend he was savaged in print by no more vicious a creature than Sir Bobby Robson, having been placed in needless jeopardy by his employers.

The misconception is of the impossible job, but if England managers stuck to football it would be relatively uncomplicated. If you win matches, the people will love you; if you do not, they will not. Not hard to understand, is it? No, what complicates matters are the sideshows, the distractions, what Boris Johnson would have called the inverted pile of piffle that consumes the post and makes it a professional Rubik’s Cube.

So how did Capello contrive to upset benign Sir Bobby, the kindly uncle of English football? He left a match early. Now this in itself is no surprise. Capello, like Eriksson, has been skipping the last ten minutes of games since he arrived without drawing comment, although, yes, it is irritating. England managers do not have a whole lot to do between fixtures. Much of the season is what summer must be like for teachers. Oh, sure, there is preparation and the best ones will be thinking up new ways to expand and nurture inquiring minds, but being an international coach is not exactly a 14-hour shift in an inner-city hospital casualty unit. The very least Capello could do is stay until the end of matches, particularly because he has been bemoaning the lack of English players on view in the Barclays Premier League.

The game Capello ducked out of was Liverpool’s Champions League win over Arsenal at Anfield. There is no explanation other than he wanted to avoid the traffic, and that is a pretty lame excuse. On Sunday Capello took in Liverpool’s league win over Blackburn Rovers and then skipped across to Old Trafford for the game between Manchester United and Arsenal. Nothing wrong with a sharp exit there. Better that than for the cameras to focus in on the England manager with seven minutes to go, only to see him with a huge AA Road Atlas spread across his lap, deep in conversation with his assistant.

Capello: “Now if we drop down over the bridge at Runcorn, we can hang a left, shoot up the M56 and then cut across through Whalley Range. Either that or we take a chance on the East Lancs Road. I’m just thinking the M62’s going to be murder.”

Franco Baldini: “Sorry, did you say something? I was just trying to work out what position Steven Gerrard thinks he is playing again.”

Yet at Anfield on Tuesday last week Capello had nowhere to go, no appointment that could have been any more informative than seeing Walcott turn the game, temporarily, in Arsenal’s favour. Also, he has a driver, so where was the fire? Yet this was only half of what drew Robson’s attention to his absence.

The lightning rod was erected two days later when the FA circulated quotes from the England manager paying tribute to the presence of three Premier League teams in the Champions League semi-finals and singling out Walcott’s contribution to Arsenal’s second goal for special praise, a contribution he could not have seen live because he had left.

To make matters worse, the directors’ box at Anfield is next to the press box, so every sports writer knew that Capello had left before Walcott’s cameo. Of course, he will have seen it on television, but even so, there was something vaguely disingenuous about a hymn of praise to a player he could not be bothered hanging around to watch. Yet if there is mitigation for Capello, it is this: the Walcott statement would not have been his doing.

Capello has had several informal meetings with journalists since starting the job in January and has always been engaging company and refreshingly candid. Ask him a straight question about football and you get a straight answer, or as straight as discretion permits. In turn, this frankness has been respected. From our brief meetings, however, I would suggest that there is little likelihood that two days after the Champions League quarter-final at Anfield he was badgering his employers to issue a statement on his behalf, particularly one that, had the sequence of events occurred when Steve McClaren was in charge, would have brought forth accusations of spin-doctoring.

And so it begins. The inch-by-inch journey to the lunatic asylum, with everything that is insignificant inflated and what matters placed on the back burner. The next time Capello visits Anfield an FA hireling will no doubt be dispatched to create a diversion when he wants to leave, perhaps by flicking Tom Hicks on the ear and then, when he turns around, rolling the eyes in the direction of George Gillett Jr. Wait for the fight to break out and signal to Capello to make his getaway. Well, it would make as much sense as releasing quotes enthusing about a player he did not stay to see.

Increasingly, Capello has been sucked into our madness, rather than calming us with his sanity. He is still casting around for a captain, the English equivalent of Franco Baresi his target, but without success. John Terry remains the most obvious choice, but Capello appears to have issues with him as a role model. If this problem proves insurmountable, why have one captain at all? Give the armband to the player with the most caps game by game and leave it there. That is the Italian way. Instead, Capello had ended up starring in the England captaincy sideshow, the polar opposite of how it was meant to be.

Next up is the Youth Management Group, which sounds like one of those postmodern, post-rock bands that are all the rage. Capello will be in it, apparently, alongside Rick Parry, the Liverpool chief executive who may soon be at a loose end, Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA’s director of football development, Damien Comolli, the sporting director of Tottenham Hotspur, and Huw Jennings, the youth development manager for the Premier League.

Capello’s career in management started with the youth team at AC Milan and he is a voice of authority on the subject, so this makes sense. He is also the man who took the England captaincy from Terry and awarded it to Rio Ferdinand before the match against France in March by announcing “Rio Ferdinand is captain” and sitting down again, not because he is the flint-hearted authoritarian many imagine, but because his grasp of English did not extend to inspiring speeches. One wonders, therefore, what he can bring to a discussion specialising in technical matters in which the concepts will be complex and challenging linguistically.

Even if Capello overcomes this hurdle, is the Youth Management Group not a commitment too far, considering his England first team is a work in progress? Is Capello not better concentrating on the England of the present rather than worrying about the England of the future? As it stands, he has no clue who his striker will be by the time the World Cup qualifying campaign starts. Is this not more pressing than pitch sizes for 11-year-olds? We have Brooking for that; Capello is our guy for here and now.

In 2006, when the FA was casting about for Eriksson’s replacement, a similar digression occurred. Candidates were asked about coaching structures and the leadership of the national game as well as how England were going to qualify for Euro 2008, and we all know what happened next. It was easier for McClaren, though, because he had experience of English football, so he knew that Jermaine Jenas was not a better central midfield player than Michael Carrick, whatever his January form suggested.

Capello is still finding this stuff out. Why complicate matters with multi-tasking? An informal talk with Brooking when his command of the language has improved would serve more purposefully than a place on the Youth Management Group, particularly if he has to take an early cut from important matches to make sure he is up for a meeting in time.

This week, for about 36 hours, Capello is in Lesotho, the landlocked African republic in which the United Nations project 36 per cent of the population will be inflicted with HIV/Aids by 2022, and while his presence there, however brief, will be welcomed by humanitarian groups and charities, there remains the feeling that this has as much to do with possible events in 2018 at Wembley as doomsday 2022 in the capital city of Maseru. A noble cause it may be, but happening so soon into his tenure, the trip appears as just another item on Capello’s hectic agenda, another way in which the FA gets its £6 million worth.

McClaren ended up with better protection for his hair than his goalkeeper, Glenn Hoddle had a woman putting invisible force fields over the goals, Kevin Keegan quit by a toilet and Eriksson picked a kid because he looked good in training with Arsenal’s reserve team. It gets them all in the end. Make the most of the level-headed Capello while you can, for it will give us something to remember him by when he gives the England captaincy to an imaginary bunny rabbit called Cyril or turns up at Wembley in a Day-Glo paca-mac.