Fabio Capello finds the missing link: Rooney resurgent as manager finally changes formation

Published on Saturday 4 September 2010 16:11

Fabio Capello blew a metaphorical lampone to his critics with England's 4-0 rout of Bulgaria at Wembley, a positive first step along the road to Euro 2012, although the legacy of a fruitless South African campaign means that even an emphatic victory may have merely bought the Italian time.

Defeat by Switzerland in Basel's St Jakob-Park on Tuesday in their second Group G fixture would guarantee that Capello's most vociferous detractors in the media - many of them the very people who lauded him as the no-nonsense, no-WAGs, tactically astute, disciplinarian anti-Sven - would resurrect calls for the resignation they maintain he should have tendered following the World Cup humiliation by Germany in Bloemfontein.

That 4-1 defeat by what was effectively a German Under-24 team scarred the English psyche deeply, shattering the inflated expectations that accompany the Three Lions into any finals. As a result, every game is now being interpreted as a test of "Don Fabio's" ability to cling on to his 5m-a-year job. The signs are that Switzerland, ironically the country to which the 64-year-old retreats to his plush villa on the shores of Lake Lugano, will present as stern a test as England are likely to encounter en route to Poland and Ukraine.

The Swiss, remember, were good enough this summer to lower Spain's mask of invincibility, even if the Euro 2008 winners recovered to become world champions. In the German coach Ottmar Hitzfeld they have a manager whose record, like Capello's, lists Champions League successes (with Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich), and who will be even more at home. Hitzfeld, now 61, was a striker with FC Basel in the mid-1970s when his counterpart was bossing the Juventus midfield.

Switzerland have yet to play a group fixture. However, the awkwardness encountered in Friday's opening qualifiers by neighbouring France (1-0 losers at home to Belarus), Germany (the narrowest of wins over Belgium) and Italy (coming from behind in Estonia) will encourage them to believe they can create similar problems for England.

For his part, Capello may have studied those scorelines and reflected that maybe he is not such a bad manager after all. Bulgaria are a faded force compared with the side who reached the 1994 World Cup semi-finals. Yet there was much in England's display to placate a disillusioned public, not least the desire to show that these multi-millionaires "cared". As Jermain Defoe said after scoring a true finisher's hat-trick, players should always want to perform when they pull on the jersey and hear "the natural anthem".

Most encouragingly, for Sir Alex Ferguson as well as Capello, Wayne Rooney, pictured below left, actually looked fit, sharp and hungry, perhaps for the first time since winter turned to spring. The man his team-mates call "Wazza" fell far short of his world-class billing in South Africa. Here, though, he delivered a master class in linking the midfield to the front, setting up Defoe's early confidence-booster and directly assisting in all the other goals.

With Rooney in this form, and in that deeper position, talk of Paul Scholes being coaxed out of international retirement becomes redundant. Managers often say a player just needs to score, off his backside if necessary, to start the goals flowing again. Rooney suddenly resembled a scoring spree waiting to happen, but a prolonging of his year-long, 11-match barren run for England will not unduly concern Capello provided he continues to create havoc from the "hole".

His role there was part of a substantial body of evidence suggesting that Capello, for all his fabled intransigence, has taken on board some of the criticisms against him. Instead of the rigid 4-4-2 formation which paired Rooney and the hapless Emile Heskey up front, he opted for the fluidity of a 4-4-1-1 in which Steven Gerrard's drive and distribution were deployed centrally rather than being wasted in a wide-left berth.

By picking Joe Hart he also showed he had caught up, somewhat belatedly, with those who pointed out that Hart was the Premier League's most consistent goalkeeper last season. The 23-year-old from Manchester City has long had the requisite agility. Signs are that he also exudes confidence, which transmits itself to defenders, and the temperament to complement his technique.

His City colleague Adam Johnson's goal-scoring cameo will also go down in Capello's credit column. At the same time it should raise questions as to why the in-form, two-footed winger (and indeed Theo Walcott) was left out of a World Cup squad which included the often-tried and largely untrusted Shaun Wright-Phillips.

The main area of concern for England moving forward, apart from Capello's curious reluctance to recognise that the ball-retention of Tottenham's Tom Huddlestone makes him a viable playmaking alternative to Gerrard or for the holding role taken by Gareth Barry, is their weakness at centre-back. In the absence of John Terry and Rio Ferdinand, Michael Dawson failed to enhance his claims before departing on a stretcher with knee and ankle ligament injuries. Phil Jagielka, of Everton, and Gary Cahill, from Bolton, are reliable at club level yet remain unproven internationally.

Identical doubts, of course, still hang over the coach who led AC Milan and Real Madrid to great triumphs but, the critics say, actively contributed to England choking again on the global stage. Some will be unconvinced even if Capello delivers another near-perfect qualifying campaign, waiting to see whether he fares better in tournament combat.

Others, he can be assured, are already primed with reciprocal raspberries and "Basel Faulty" headlines.