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Fabio Capello is convinced that a hysterical press are a significant cause of the England football team’s travails. And, just to prove him right, I spent part of the weekend wondering if we would be better off with José Mourinho or Jürgen Klinsmann.

Would the zestful Klinsmann have been better at blasting away the post-Steve McClaren misery? Or Mourinho quicker to solve our tactical dilemmas? To consider a new manager is the default reaction of the England supporter, and the preferable alternative to accepting that our players are doomed to fall hopelessly short of leading international honours, which is closer to the truth but too depressing to contemplate, particularly on the eve of a new campaign that begins this weekend.

Capello is one the world’s most successful coaches, but, bluntly, there have not been such downbeat preliminaries to a qualification programme since 2000, when Kevin Keegan was at the helm and heading fast for the rocks. If Alistair Darling has told a cheerless truth about the economy, God forbid that he start talking about the prospects of the England team.

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Capello inherited a group of players scarred deeply by successive failures and, now, even a man with his vast experience is concerned about how to kick them out of this rut.

Small signs of progress at the end of last season gave way to the familiar stage fright for the 2-2 draw against the Czech Republic. Even for those of us who were thousands of miles away at the Olympics in China, it was a performance we could easily conjure in the mind’s eye, down to the failure to keep possession and the concluding jeers.

That setback has given Capello an almighty job to do as preparations start today for 2010 World Cup qualifying games against Andorra and, critically, Croatia, and one wonders whether even a man of his worldly wisdom knows where to start, except by recruiting a shrink. A ring-around of players and their associates over the weekend revealed a leadenness of spirit that Capello must somehow banish in his faltering English.

He tried to do so before the Czech game when he spoke to the squad about self-confidence. He told them they were too worried about the marks out of ten in the newspaper. They nodded their heads, told themselves to be bold and then promptly ran out and were paralysed by fear. Then there is the austerity that, to most of us, had seemed a welcome change after the indulgence of Sven-Göran Eriksson’s final World Cup campaign and the chumminess of McClaren.

Ludicrously exaggerated in a front-page story in The Sun on Saturday that claimed that England players had not been allowed to eat for eight hours after a training session — “England til I Diet” — nevertheless Capello is stricter than a Victorian schoolmaster.

Banning mayonnaise and butter from the dinner table should be restraints that our footballers can stomach, but there are now complaints — ready-made excuses, if you prefer — that being ordered to their rooms to rest post-training rather than loitering in the games’ room or with the masseurs have undermined the camaraderie.

Whether Capello thinks these are the whinges of pampered players, it remains his task to convince them that this is a ride not to be missed. To do so, he will not be resorting to paintball sessions or trips to the theatre, rather sticking to his plans for double training. Hard work and a few plain truths are the methods that have worked well enough for him in the past and to which he will adhere.

What is such a worry is that they are the same methods that have had such a faltering effect in his first eight months. “Did you really think it was going to be any different?” one England player said over the weekend.