It was the first question in Italian that did it. Fabio Capello gave his answer, also in his native tongue, and the nation waited for Ruben Reggiani, a translator seconded for the day from Queens Park Rangers, to relay the thoughts of the new England manager. At that point, it felt as if the roof had fallen in.

The nature of the surrender was unequivocal. The appointment made by Brian Barwick, the FA chief executive, was not a victory after all, not the triumph it had been painted, but a terrible, hollow defeat. England lost, Italy won — again. Lost the way, lost the plot, lost all knowledge of what had been invented within these shores, with no clue how to get it back.

As Barwick, the director of football development, the director of communications, senior staff, the English-speaking press, plus every England player and most fans watching at home sat in dumb ignorance of the words of the manager who has come to save them, it was as if a lone horn player was sounding the Last Post.

In the circumstances, Barwick has done all he could to address the shortcomings of the previous regime and, as he said, if Capello wins the World Cup in 2010, even the outrageous fortune lavished on the man and his backroom team will feel like money well spent. He has got the best man for the job and deserves congratulations for that. Yet the best Barwick could do is, in itself, an admission of failure.

Not for the first time, the coaching structure moulded and endorsed by the FA has not produced one man — not a solitary citizen of this island — who is considered capable of winning football matches for England. At least when Sven-Göran Eriksson arrived there was, if not a queue of domestic candidates, enough to provoke a genuine debate. This time, Capello’s election was a walkover.

He was delivered unopposed; a landslide, in fact.

Nobody is disputing that Barwick was left with no option but to search abroad, but it is the wasteland he first surveyed from his window that should give greatest cause for concern.

Barwick has been forced to spend tens of millions to relearn what we thought we knew. Imagine if, after years of supremacy had given way to defeat, the PGA in the United States decided that no American golfer was capable of captaining its Ryder Cup team to victory over Europe and offered the job to Ian Woosnam. Even an American victory would then feel like a British flag planted on Yankee soil.

And while the sight of an Englishman holding aloft the World Cup in Johannesburg would be celebrated at surface level with all the fervour of 1966, deep down it could not be the same. Yesterday, as the England manager spoke to the nation with the assistance of Clark Football Languages Ltd, from Langley Crescent in St Albans, Hertfordshire, even those who had talked with greatest conviction of getting the best man, not an English man, shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

Barwick, the executive who has masterminded this coup, did not have the bearing of a man who thought that he had won. Asked if appointing a foreign manager, even a great one, was not an admission of failure on the part of the national association, his first words spoke volumes. “Well, undoubtedly,” Barwick said. “At this time we had to look outside these shores, but I feel it should always be the ambition of the FA to recruit an England manager from within our own country.”

It sounds simple enough, yet on two occasions in three it has proved impossible. Barwick referred his audience to the FA strategic review that will be published in March, insisting that coach development will be its central plank. He quoted Sir Trevor Brooking — or “Sir Brooking”, as Capello called him — who said that the skills of the new manager must be sucked out of him and used across the whole coaching framework.

Yet how is that to happen? Considering the small calamity that befell Steve McClaren, Capello’s predecessor, the new manager’s prime focus must be on winning matches and extracting world-class performances from first-team players who have failed to reach potential for years. To give him the wider responsibility of rescuing the standards of coaching and management in England is to dilute his time, and perhaps his message.

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