FABIO CAPELLO never bothered to learn much English, or much about England. His €7.1 million a year was not enough to interest him greatly in the culture of the country whose national game he was hired to revive by winning a major international tournament.
Last night his lack of understanding led directly to his resignation from the job of England manager, after a meeting in which he was confronted over his refusal to accept the stripping of the England captaincy from John Terry.
In four months’ time the England team will travel to Poland and Ukraine for the finals of the European Championships, after a qualifying tournament through which Capello led them with an unbeaten record.
Now they are facing the task of redeeming the disaster of the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa, for which the Italian was held largely responsible, without either a manager or a captain in place.
More will be heard from the English FA at a press conference today, and there will be widespread rejoicing if it turns out that Harry Redknapp’s time has come at last. If popular sentiment has any say in the matter, the job will be offered to a man who emerged yesterday from Southwark crown court having been found not guilty of tax evasion.
Capello is 65, the age that Redknapp, currently the manager of Tottenham Hotspur, will reach next month. As men, that is virtually all they have in common.
Whereas Capello never seemed to respect the essential qualities of English football, Redknapp – a former winger who played for West Ham United alongside Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters, the heroes of the 1966 World Cup, and whose son Jamie played for England – is steeped in them.
Players like him, and he makes them play better. Several members of his Tottenham side are in the England squad, and they are mounting a challenge for the English league title for the first time in half a century.
That preoccupation could be thought to stand in the way of Redknapp’s appointment, but since England have only one match – against Holland on February 29th – between now and the end of the season, he might be persuaded to take the job on a part-time basis before accepting a permanent commission in the summer.
When the FA offered Capello a king’s ransom to revive their moribund team at the end of 2007, they cannot have done so in the belief they would be hiring Martin Luther King, but his defence of Terry, who will appear in a London court in July to face a charge of using racist language to insult the black QPR player Anton Ferdinand, surprised even those familiar with his style.
Capello went on Italian TV last weekend to proclaim that demoting Terry was a mistake and to assert the Chelsea man would remain, in his eyes, the de facto captain.The outburst exposed Capello as disastrously out of touch with the environment in which he works.
If he thought he was presenting himself as a man of principle, even footballing ones, he was wrong. Instead he showed a complete inability, or unwillingness, to grasp the finer points of a very significant argument.
GuardianService
BETTING: England boss
Harry Redknapp 1/2
Stuart Pearce 5/1
Guss Hiddink 10/1
Jose Mourinho 12/1
Martin O’Neill 14/1
Roy Hodgson 14/1
Alan Pardew 16/1
Arsene Wenger 20/1
Rafael Benitez 20/1
Carlo Ancelotti 25/1
Sam Allardyce 33/1
