The Capello crisis

Whatever Fabio Capello achieved as a club manager with Milan, Roma and Real Madrid, he has scant grasp of the international game, and certainly not when it comes to dealing with England players.

September 19 and the trip to Zagreb looms like a threatening cloud over England’s team, and the bitterly disappointing Fabio Capello. Especially disappointing to me who has known, liked and admired him as first player then manager from as long ago as 1973, when he materially helped Italy at long last to beat England in Turin. Frankly, he has so far been a disaster, throwing sheer common sense to the winds, crazily indulging a fading, immobile David Beckham in what seems anything but a magnificent obsession.

That and other follies were all too horribly clear when England met the Czechs at Wembley, and against all logic and justice, scrambled to a 2-2 draw right at the end of injury time with one of the surely most scrappy goals ever scored in the Empire Stadium by an England team.

Beckhamitis, as I call it, has been all too evident in Capello, allegedly a hard manager with a beady eye on realities, from the first. When, very much in the bizarre way of his inept predecessor, Steve McClaren, he sent observers thousands of miles across the Atlantic and the States themselves, to watch Beckham play for the benighted Los Angeles Galaxy in what was nothing more than a pre-season friendly.

Beckham has long been a busted flush. McClaren for once did the right thing when, taking over the international team after the 2006 World Cup he initially found the guts to drop Beckham. Only and cravenly to relent and to bring him back. This, though, Beckham had had a wretched 2006 World Cup in Germany, even if his insidious free kicks could still produce goal. Any pace he once had is a thing of the remote past, static to a degree, never able or willing to take on his immediate defensive opponent, let alone perform the most important move in a winger’s book; getting to the by line and pulling the ball back into the goalmouth.

What this means and has so plainly meant is that choosing Beckham on that right flank has put a virtual break on England’s attacking play. No one can deny the skill and precision with which he can waft balls into the goalmouth or even into the goal itself, but the price paid for indulging him is tactically huge. He is like a kind of howitzer, lobbing in his shells from far away, rather than ever getting fully engaged in the battle.

And it is not as if England had no other candidates to the position. In Germany there was Tottenham’s Aaron Lennon, full of pace and skill who, when rarely given a chance to figure in that World Cup, electrified the attack. Last season, it is true, saw a falling away of form, a somewhat profligate use of the final ball, but this season, with Spurs he seems to be firing on all cylinders again.

Above all, there is David Bentley, now a Spurs player himself, essentially a right winger but with Lennon playing so well, albeit in a team which made a pitiful start to the season, Bentley has been playing in midfield where he is perfectly at home. But he, too, has, in abundance, the true winger’s gifts and indeed finishing power. Yet, when England met France in Paris last season as Capello began his new role, he kept Beckham on the field for fully 63 unproductive minutes, finally bringing Bentley on, with the absurd remark that he liked to give players an opportunity. That was Beckham’s 100th cap and for sentimental reasons perhaps you could have made some sort of a case for his making a token appearance, but 63 minutes!

Against the Czechs, he did indeed again make a goal with a perfectly flighted right flank free kick headed in by Wes Brown, but overall he was as pedestrian as ever. Once more Bentley did get on but far too late to make any difference. And another flying winger, Arsenal’s Theo Walcott, never got off the bench at all.

Meanwhile even in the USA, in the Major League Soccer, Beckham has failed to ignite his team. The arrival of as famed a figure as Holland’s Ruud Gullit, a superb player and highly experienced coach, did nothing to improve a team which went seven games lately without a victory till Gullit himself walked out and Alexi Lallas, the managing administrator, once a rumbustius USA international centre-back, was sacked. You wondered what the colossally rich owners of the Galaxy felt about paying Beckham such a massive amount of money when there was so little reward. But never mind. He even popped up in Beijing in the Olympics closing ceremony, kicking balls into the crowd from a stage; which hardly obliged him to run. They love him out there and he was even applauded off the pitch at Wembley, when a proper response might have been to bombard him with rotten eggs.

Then there is the problem of Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard and their dualism. One which should long ago have been laid to rest, yet which emerged again in the Czech match. It has long been evident that these two cannot play together in the same midfield where, to put it into its bluntest terms, Lampard of Chelsea simply gets in the Liverpool player’s way. McClaren ducked the problem time and again. Capello resurrected it against the Czechs when Lampard played centrally and Gerrard, the essence of dynamism and an essential feature of any England team he plays for provided he is properly deployed, was yet again forced out to the left.

When the outspoken Portsmouth manager Harry Redknapp, who happens to be Lampard’s uncle, complained that Gerrard was wasted on the left, Capello at the post match press conference denied that he had been used there! What seems all too horribly clear to me is that whatever Fabio achieved as a club manager with Milan, Roma and Real Madrid, he has scant grasp of the international game, and certainly not when it comes to dealing with England players.

Under McClaren, England deployed a farcical and fatal 3-5-2 formation in Croatia, lost a vital European qualifying game and, when little Isreal had given them another chase by beating Russia, pitifully lost to Croatia again, at Wembley and were out of the money. It was not Capello’s fault at Wembely that his centre-backs Rio Ferdinand and John Terry looked so vulnerable.