Capello's on a damage-limitation exercise... so why did he pick the wrong team and give them incoherent tactics?

Frustrated: Fabio Capello sees his plans going wrong at Wembley
13 April 2012

The sports teacher at my primary school in an Essex new town was a Welshman who had a dark beard and a ragged Bobby Charlton-style combover.

Every Wednesday afternoon we played competitive football matches against local schools. There were five or six automatic picks for the team and the rest of us had to scramble for places during games held on match days.

Our sports teacher had a simple, direct approach to football: he liked strong boys who could punt the ball high and long upfield, as if they were kicking for touch at Cardiff Arms Park. No slow possession game for him.

I worked this out early on, and invariably secured my place in the team by smashing the ball as far as I could whenever it came to me. Then, moments later, the sports teacher would jog over and whisper the happy words: "Have you got your boots, Jase? You're in!"

For too long too many English footballers have played as if they were coached by my old sports teacher or variations of his type. On Saturday, against a deeply ordinary Switzerland team who have no chance of qualifying for Euro 2012, and a week after on the same pitch Barcelona had enthralled us all, England stumbled to their fourth match in a row without a win at Wembley.

Players with storied reputations, such as Frank Lampard, Theo Walcott, Darren Bent and James Milner, lived down to expectations, as they usually do with the three lions on their shirts.

With the exception of Jack Wilshere and the substitutes Ashley Young and Leighton Baines, the players treated the ball with suspicion, rather than as something to hold and control and caress, as Barca had. It was no worse than the performances last summer in South Africa but it was awful all the same.

It's too late for Fabio Capello to effect the kind of transformation of the culture of the national team that Jurgen Klinsmann and Joachim Low did for Germany in the run-up to the 2006 World Cup. He's in his last year and it's now very much an exercise in damage limitation - of getting England to the European finals and then of getting out with the money and what is left of his reputation intact.

Yet more and more the stern-jawed autocrat and Silvio Berlusconi apologist seems mystified by the limitations and inconsistencies of his players. He mutters incomprehensibly about their "fatigue". He fiddles with his line-ups yet still ends up picking the wrong team and his tactics are incoherent.

On Saturday, England finished with a forward line comprising three willing but limited runners from mid-table Aston Villa. Is anyone really surprised they didn't win?

Capello should have been sent on his way after the World Cup debacle and his collaboration with the online gaming project, the Capello Index.

But of course the Football Association couldn't afford to sack the man who is estimated to be paid more than double any other coach of a national team. But the love died in this relationship long ago.

One of many problems for the FA is that they still don't quite realise just how much their organisation and the English are disliked by the rest of the football world. Nor how desperately lacking in self-confidence they are, hence the exaggerated deference to continentals such as Capello.

In seeking to prevent Sepp Blatter's coronation as FIFA president, FA chairman David Bernstein showed resolution and principle but his was always going to be a gesture as futile as it was belated, one perceived to have been motivated by bitterness.

The fact is that England have been enthusiastic players in FIFA's game of cronyism - look at the way they courted Trinidad's rebarbative Jack Warner, the CONCACAF president, only to be finally rejected and humiliated by him.

However, a crisis is too good an opportunity to waste and there's at least a sense that Bernstein and FA director Trevor Brooking recognise just how low the standing of English football has fallen.

After arriving at Liverpool as manager in 1959, Bill Shankly, who grew up playing repeated five-a-side games in the pit village of Glenbuck, galvanised both the club and city with his vision of the romantic game. Liverpool's passing game - the ease in possession, the close control, the simple, accurate delivery - was worked on and enhanced in five-a-side games in training, a Shankly innovation.

There's no reason why English boys should not play like Barcelona or as the great Liverpool sides did, rather than as my old sports teacher would have wished. We do produce highly-technical players, like Wilshere and Paul Scholes, but far too few of them.

The appointment, as head of elite development, of Gareth Southgate, a fine, technical footballer himself and an increasingly composed pundit, is encouraging. Southgate's proposal that children should not be allowed to play 11-a-side football until the age of 13, so as to enhance their development, is the kind of bold measure, among many, that is required if deep structural change is ever to happen. The alternative is much more dross of the kind we witnessed on Saturday.

Pour moi, Barzalona deserves plaudits

"Only the very young and very beautiful can be so aloof," sang Tom Robinson on his early Eighties hit War Baby. Jockey Mickael Barzalona is certainly very young - aged just 19 - and he has a teenager's swagger and insouciance, as he demonstrated by winning the Derby with a thrilling ride on the French raider Pour Moi.

There was much grumbling afterwards by racing purists -perhaps dejected that the Queen's horse, Carlton House, had been beaten - about the way Barzalona had stood up in the saddle to celebrate, even before his horse had crossed the line fractionally ahead of his nearest challengers.

This act of showboating could have cost him the race, it was said, with dismal counter-factual logic. But it didn't. And I stood to celebrate with him after backing the winner.

Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman

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