The Italian's handling of the John Terry situation shows that he never really understood the way English football works
Fabio Capello with John Terry, whose sacking as England captain led to the Italian’s resignation as the national coach. Photograph: Eddie Keogh/Reuters
Fabio Capello never bothered to learn much English, or much about England. His £6m 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. On Wednesday 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 Football Association at a press conference on Thursday, 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 on Wednesday 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. The Italian used a fortune amassed from a long and mostly distinguished career to compile an art collection reputedly containing several Kandinskys; the East End-born 'Arry, also a very wealthy man, still has something of the street market about him.
Players like him, and he makes them play better. Several members of his Tottenham side are in the England squad, including their captain, Scott Parker, a contender to replace Terry as skipper, and they are currently 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 as Capello's successor, but since England have only one friendly match – against Holland on 29 February – 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.
The man who held the job until Wednesday will leave with few regrets on either side. When the FA offered him a king's ransom to revive their moribund team at the end of 2007, they cannot have done so in the belief that 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 that, whatever the formal position, the Chelsea man would remain, in his eyes, the de facto captain. A misjudgment on every conceivable level, 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.
For all his promises to learn English, Capello failed to master enough of the language to express himself in anything but the simplest terms, or to participate in debates without leaving scope for misinterpretation. Other foreign managers working in England – Anglophiles like Gerard Houllier and fluent linguists like Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho – avoided such problems.
And unlike his English contemporaries, Capello has not been an intimate witness to the long and largely successful struggle to banish racism from stadiums, dressing rooms and managers' offices – a battle still being fought in his own country.
He enjoyed living among London's super-rich, but it was easy to put his absence from the Premier League's Christmas fixtures, which would have given him many chances to observe the progress of potential members of his squad, down to a basic lack of enthusiasm. He was on holiday, as he often seemed to be, and did not reappear until mid-January. Last week he was said to be on holiday again.Two years ago, shortly before the ill-fated trip to South Africa, the FA displayed fatal naivety when they reacted to the news that he was receiving overtures from a big Italian club by extending his contract.
When the World Cup turned sour, they were stuck with a man who won exactly two-thirds of his 42 matches with England – including a tumultuous victory over Croatia in Zagreb in 2008, when a fresh dawn was glimpsed, and an unexpected victory over Spain, the world champions, at Wembley last November – while losing one in seven. The defeats turned out to be more significant than the victories.
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 Football Association at a press conference on Thursday, 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 on Wednesday 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. The Italian used a fortune amassed from a long and mostly distinguished career to compile an art collection reputedly containing several Kandinskys; the East End-born 'Arry, also a very wealthy man, still has something of the street market about him.
Players like him, and he makes them play better. Several members of his Tottenham side are in the England squad, including their captain, Scott Parker, a contender to replace Terry as skipper, and they are currently 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 as Capello's successor, but since England have only one friendly match – against Holland on 29 February – 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.
The man who held the job until Wednesday will leave with few regrets on either side. When the FA offered him a king's ransom to revive their moribund team at the end of 2007, they cannot have done so in the belief that 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 that, whatever the formal position, the Chelsea man would remain, in his eyes, the de facto captain. A misjudgment on every conceivable level, 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.
For all his promises to learn English, Capello failed to master enough of the language to express himself in anything but the simplest terms, or to participate in debates without leaving scope for misinterpretation. Other foreign managers working in England – Anglophiles like Gerard Houllier and fluent linguists like Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho – avoided such problems.
And unlike his English contemporaries, Capello has not been an intimate witness to the long and largely successful struggle to banish racism from stadiums, dressing rooms and managers' offices – a battle still being fought in his own country.
He enjoyed living among London's super-rich, but it was easy to put his absence from the Premier League's Christmas fixtures, which would have given him many chances to observe the progress of potential members of his squad, down to a basic lack of enthusiasm. He was on holiday, as he often seemed to be, and did not reappear until mid-January. Last week he was said to be on holiday again.Two years ago, shortly before the ill-fated trip to South Africa, the FA displayed fatal naivety when they reacted to the news that he was receiving overtures from a big Italian club by extending his contract.
When the World Cup turned sour, they were stuck with a man who won exactly two-thirds of his 42 matches with England – including a tumultuous victory over Croatia in Zagreb in 2008, when a fresh dawn was glimpsed, and an unexpected victory over Spain, the world champions, at Wembley last November – while losing one in seven. The defeats turned out to be more significant than the victories.
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