Marcello Lippi, Italy's World Cup-winning coach, claims Fabio Capello may have to drop a big name player in order to achieve success.

Lippi, who was linked with the England post before his fellow countryman's appointment, was criticised for leaving out Antonio Cassano from his squad before going on to lift the Jules Rimet trophy last year. He also refused to bow to public pressure and used ageing striker Alessandro Del Piero only sparingly.

In their place, Lippi employed previously unheralded players like Fabio Grosso and Simone Perrotta who made important contributions in Germany, and the former Juventus coach acknowledged that Capello would also have to make some difficult decisions.

"Capello's most difficult task will be to make a team become a team, something which in recent years it hasn't felt like," Lippi said.

"That will be the most difficult challenge. He will need to construct a team, the national team is not the selection of the best players of the country, but in order to make a team you may also need to drop an important player that perhaps is not [on] the same wavelength as the others."

Capello gave his first press conference yesterday through a translator, promising to learn English within a month, and Lippi also believes this is crucial to Capello's future with the national team.

"The fact that I don't speak English is one of the reasons why I have turned down three or four proposals in the last two years that have arrived from the English Premiership," he added.

"I have always said that a coach must transmit to his players everything that goes through his heart and head and in order to do so he can't be talking and then asking the interpreter to translate, it's impossible."

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