Italian coach must face the music for this disjointed and abject performance

Published on Saturday 19 June 2010 00:39

FABIO Capello: The Backlash was an enjoyable way for the English press to spend those interminable six days between the desultory draw in Rustenburg and this debacle in Cape Town. Nobody took it too seriously.

This weekend though, it will be open season on the England manager, and it won't so much be a case of the honeymoon being over, as time to start divorce proceedings. The righteous condemnations were being prepared by half-time. A persuasive explanation of England's abject performance might be hard to come by though: it defies understanding.

After the USA match, the Machiavellian genius who had been exalted in all those fawning pre-tournament profiles was subjected to some ruthless revisionism where he became a deluded dreamer to trust Ledley King's fitness, personally responsible for not finding a half-decent English goalkeeper, and cravenly cautious not to send Joe Cole on against the USA. It didn't help when, in an interview with the hardly menacing interrogator Gabby Logan, Capello appeared to lose track of what day it was.

After the Algeria game, the malaise seems more deep-rooted, a paralysing apprehension that has gripped England in between qualification and the tournament, and for many it will be irresistible to blame Capello. All of England watched last night's game with elbows crooked to hurl rotten fruit in the direction of a coach who had the temerity to raise their hopes by qualifying so effortlessly, their other arm half-raised ready to salute the acumen of this canny footballing maestro who knew that it would be madness to start a tournament with a decent performance, that form has to grow organically.

Capello, raging on the sidelines, is finding out the hard way that England World Cup teams are not finely-crafted in the machine-room before tournaments, but have to hammered crudely into passable shape on the side of the road. That's still a vague possibility. England's respectable performances in World Cups have usually entailed emergency repairs once the tournament gets underway. Can't recall the year (sometime in the 60s I believe) but Geoff Hurst only sauntered into Alf Ramsey's team after Jimmy Greaves had split a side cackling at one of his own wisecracks about Scottish weather. In 1986 England's tortuous odyssey towards a quarter-final date with Diego Maradona's fist was accomplished only after they had unearthed the hitherto-neglected genius of Peter Beardsley.

In 1990 the semi-final heroics were only possible because senior members of the squad had persuaded Bobby Robson to use the relatively sophisticated sweeper Mark Wright earlier in the tournament. Your Italian dictionary might demur, but Capello is the definition of stubborn, so he might be less amenable to the dictates of expediency than Robson or Ramsey. "I make mistakes," he admitted on Thursday, but it was apparent that this was a sentence he had constructed rather awkwardly from his English grammar that very morning, not one he had ever used before.

He's too old (64 yesterday), proud and settled in his convictions to change his approach now. His generation is dismissive, not to say contemptuous of the modern notion that you have to accentuate the positive. He broods on every error his players make. Capello is the antithesis of the touchy-feely manager who puts an arm around a depressed player and gently coaxes back their confidence and self-belief. His is a more martial aspect: shape up or ship out. Robert Green was duly shipped out, cast into the England wilderness, and replaced, just in case there was any danger of him retaining the tiniest degree of self-esteem, by a goalkeeper with the nickname Calamity. Green might want to give Peter Bonetti a call to inquire if there's another postman's job going on Mull.

Capello's message was that mistakes would not be forgiven. Possibly not the most relaxing thought to instil in your players' heads before a match. Logically it also means he should be making about eight changes for next Wednesday. David James will be spared. An outstanding catch from a corner midway through the first half established some authority, fast thinking in the second saved England from a John Terry-inflicted disaster.

Apart from another wrinkled veteran, Jamie Carragher, deputising for King, England's only other change was the restoration of Capello's fetish object, Gareth Barry. Barry was supposed to be the distribution line in midfield, but spent much of the match operating as an emergency defender, sparing England's blushes. Or sparing some. Too many of England's deficiencies, in touch, technique, passing and shooting, were too basic to be laid at the door of the head coach. Certainly they weren't going to be solved by Capello's frantic barking from the technical area. The worst afflicted was Wayne Rooney who seemed to have lost all memory of how to control or pass a ball. England's talisman was England's worst player. He was the most conspicuous symptom of England's collective nervous breakdown.

Capello might take a certain perverse comfort in the knowledge that Spain, France and Germany have all been beaten by supposed lesser lights at this tournament, that a win over Slovenia (which seems highly unlikely right now) would allow England to progress. It probably won't be much solace in the state of siege that will now exist for an England squad that already seems demoralised.

Perhaps some of those revisionists might like to reassess their opinions of the relaxed regime of Sven-Goran Eriksson. We may also witness the beginnings of a clamour for another manager who enjoyed success in Sweden: Roy Hodgson.