Hailing the impending appointment of Fabio Capello as “the new King of Wembley”, the Italian press gleefully mocked British tabloids yesterday for sending “armies of reporters” to Italy in a vain attempt to “dig up dirt” on a man known for his rectitude.

Italians had no doubt about it: Capello is “the right man for the job”. The phrase “ l’uomo giusto” (the right man) was used so uniformly by Italian newspapers yesterday that it might have been dictated.

They said that, unlike Sven-Göran Eriksson, he had no known “erotic weaknesses”. He was, La Repubblica said, “the right man to put a stop to England players getting drunk before matches and organising promiscuous parties between matches”.

“Capello is going to put a stop to this circus of WAGs, with players thinking about the glitzy impression their wives and girlfriends are making rather than what they have to do on the field,” La Gazzetta dello Sport said under the headline “Fantastico: Capello convinces the English”.

Attempts to find out whether Capello has had an affair have run into a brick wall, Corriere della Sera said, noting that his marriage to Laura is rock solid. “The mere fact that England has taken on an Italian manager is an almost extraordinary event, but is no surprise in Italy because we’ve been talking about him every day for 40 years,” the newspaper added.

It said that “the English have only ever had one foreign manager, namely Eriksson, and they are still making fun of him”. The English obviously found it hard to adjust to the idea of entrusting “the third most important position of state after the Queen and the incumbent of Downing Street to a foreign invader”.

But precisely because to be England manager was like being head of state, a candidate’s life was invariably “passed through a sieve to find any possible grain of scandal. It’s difficult to know what the British journalists who have arrived in Italy to trawl through Capello’s past hope to find.”

What they will find, Corriere della Sera said, is “a tough, extremely ambitious, extremely correct and very confident man who is a great connoisseur of football and of great footballers. He only speaks once and what he says is what he means. If you don’t understand it, then that’s tough - no matter how big a salary you are on.”

It said that Capello “wins where no one else does, and that’s why he always gets the most difficult but also the best-paid jobs. Getting the England job as he approaches the age of 62 is the final seal on an exceptional career. He has won seven championships in two countries, Italy and Spain. He can say like Julius Caesar that he came, he saw, he conquered – and then he did it again.”

He was being “extremely well paid, but with reason - he has to do battle not only with the British tabloids but also with the lack of attacking players in the England side. If he gets the players, he will win. The problem is England, not him.”

La Repubblica said: “The truth is the English are desperate and they want a big name, which Capello certainly is. English football was “a disaster at the national level, hardly able to field any players who are actually English apart from Gerrard, Lampard, Rooney, Terry and the two Coles. He must hope that younger players such as Walcott and Wright-Phillips will mature fast.”

Capello is “rugged, fearless and unbending”, Corriere dello Sport said. “The English invented football and don’t much like the idea of an Italian trainer. But he has one particular quality – he may be rarely liked, but he always wins. He is the right man for England, the prisoner of a glorious past which refuses to return – so far.”

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