It was, on reflection, a peculiarly English inquisition. There we were, standing in a cheap marquee in Bloemfontein, our heroes having been embarrassed again on the World Cup stage, and, in turn, we asked one of the leading managers in world football, in a variety of ways, whether he planned to resign. It was an unedifying scene, one that was made the more absurd by the inescapable sound of vuvuzela horns being blown outside and the noise of a drunken Englishman repeatedly slurring the line “Are we Scotland in disguise?”
But when you know that Fabio Capello will not offer detailed post-match analysis or engage in a debate about where English football is going wrong — and, crucially, when you know that his job, rightly or wrongly, is suddenly on the line after a crushing 4-1 defeat at the hands of Germany — what else, really, is there to ask him?
How did it come to this? How, having arrived in South Africa less than four weeks ago with such high hopes, had Capello diminished to the extent where he looked almost as fallible and impotent as Graham Taylor, Kevin Keegan, Steve McClaren and his other inglorious predecessors?
The “impossible job”, as Taylor called it, seems to do for them all in the end, but never quite so spectacularly and so quickly as it seems to have done for Capello, whose authority has weakened as the most miserable, abject and forgettable of England World Cup campaigns unfolded around him.
There was something sad about Capello from the moment he walked into the media tent in Bloemfontein on Sunday night, initially having to wait in the wings as Joachim Löw, the Germany coach, talked his audience through his tactical masterclass.
Löw did not mean to sound triumphalist, but, as he explained how he had made plans to neutralise the threat of Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard and how Mesut Özil and Thomas Müller had exploited the wide-open spaces behind them in midfield, you were struck, not for the first time in recent weeks, that Capello’s tenure was unravelling before your eyes.
For those of us in the England press pack who would back Capello to stay on — and we seem to be in a minority of about 40 per cent — sadder still was the sight of him yesterday afternoon, back at the England training camp near Rustenburg.
He looked drained. Unusually, his impeccably groomed hair was haywire. And as he told a small group of newspaper journalists, gathered around a table, that he had been told to wait two weeks while the FA’s board weighs up whether it wants him to continue as England manager, it felt alarmingly like it could be the end.
London, September 10, 2009 It is the morning after the night before and the sun is shining gloriously over Hyde Park. The nation is heady with expectation and optimism after England secured their place in the World Cup finals with a resounding 5-1 win over Croatia at Wembley.
Capello sits in an upstairs function room at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, exuding an air of total authority as he lays out his plans for the summer ahead. We nod sagely as he emphasises the importance of his players’ fitness at the end of the season and approvingly as he says, with reference to the dreaded presence of their WAGs, that “we are there to play, not for a holiday”.
At one point he is asked for the secret of his success. He hesitates before settling on “the relationship with the players. I respect them and they respect me. This is very important.”
London, May 10, 2010 The venue is the London Stock Exchange. The invitation states that Capello is making himself available to the media for the launch of a sports science project.
It is an unexpected opportunity on the day that he is settling on his 30-man provisional squad for the World Cup, which he will announce at Wembley the next day, and so we show up, perhaps in the hope of guidance on the fitness of Gareth Barry, with little or no interest in whatever project he is endorsing.
What transpires is not on the same scale as the contrasting public-relations fiascos that ultimately did for Glenn Hoddle or Sven-Göran Eriksson, but the “Capello Index” was a stupid cash-in that had us, for almost the first time, wondering about his judgment.
Endorsing a player-ranking system, on the face of it, is not a bad thing. But this one, which would rate the performance of every player in every game at the World Cup within two hours of the final whistle, and which also had uncomfortable links with several gambling sites, looks ill-advised. His employers at the FA tell him as much and, after a furore in the newspapers, he drops it — irked at having to do so.
Somewhere, in the midst of the crisis meetings over the Capello Index, the Italian has to produce a World Cup squad. It is an uncharacteristically frenzied process. He settles on Ledley King, the injury-plagued Tottenham Hotspur captain, as cover for Rio Ferdinand, the injury-plagued Manchester United captain, and at one point a call goes out to Paul Scholes, who is asked whether he fancies coming out of international retirement after a six-year absence. Taken aback by the lateness of the call, less than 24 hours before the squad is to be named, Scholes asks to sleep on the idea. In the morning, the answer comes back as a “no”.
At one point in the evening, Capello crosses Barry off his list, having been told that the Manchester City midfield player will not recover from injury in time. Instead he turns to Owen Hargreaves, who has played one minute of competitive football since September 2008.
At a League Managers Association dinner that night, he is told the full grim details of Hargreaves’s knee problems by Sir Alex Ferguson, the United manager. Suddenly, Barry is back on the list of 30, even if his prospects appear bleak.
Graz, May 29, 2010 England’s players are reaching the end of their pre-tournament training camp in Irdning, in the Austrian Alps. Capello is sitting at a table with some journalists when he is asked about Inter Milan’s reported interest in appointing him in succession to José Mourinho. He suggests that this is a source of concern because, having planned to remove a get-out clause from his contract, which would allow him and his employers 14 days to terminate the deal at the end of the World Cup, he has seen his future slip off the agenda after the untimely resignation of Lord Triesman as the FA’s independent chairman.
The next day, after two own goals give England an ill-deserved 2-1 win over Japan in a friendly match, the FA — an organisation without a chairman or a chief executive — trumpets its intention to resolve Capello’s future before the team depart for South Africa three days later. It sounds like an unnecessary distraction as Capello is whittling his squad down to 23. In the end, they agree the new deal a matter of hours before they take off — without Theo Walcott, who is the most surprising of the seven players to miss the final cut.
Rustenburg, June 12, 2010 Capello is standing in a media tent, trying to explain the catastrophic Robert Green error that, along with some errant finishing and sloppy midfield play, has cost England two points as they draw their opening game against the United States.
It is put to him that his indecision over his choice of goalkeepers — and his unwillingness to communicate that decision, when it is finally made, until two hours before kick-off — was a factor in Green’s mistake. “No,” he says pointedly. “This is my style.”
This style has been a source of agitation among the three goalkeepers, particularly David James, who feels that he is getting the cold shoulder from Capello and his staff. There have been whispers of tension since the squad flew to Austria, and they are getting louder.
There is dissatisfaction about the intensity of the training, which some players feel is having an adverse effect on their fitness. Capello intervenes after John Terry expresses his unhappiness with an exercise ordered by Massimo Neri, the fitness coach. Terry walks off the training pitch, insisting on having treatment.
It is, say a succession of text messages from within the perimeter fence of the Royal Bafokeng Sports Campus, “really tense”.
Cape Town, June 18, 2010 The weather is warm enough in Cape Town for England supporters to mill happily around the bars on the waterfront. They are expectant of an easy victory over Algeria to give England’s campaign some momentum and the news that James has been called up in place of Green is welcomed by most. But for those of us following the team, fresh concerns have been raised by Wayne Rooney’s appearance in front of the media.
The Manchester United striker starts with an honest appraisal when he says that we saw only “glimpses” of his best form against the US. But the most stark response comes when he is asked if he is enjoying himself. “Sometimes,” he replies, before offering a rundown of his daily routine which sounds, intentionally or not, like that of a convict: “Breakfast, train, lunch, bed, dinner, bed.”
Capello has taken the players on a squad safari and allowed them out to play golf several times, but even one of those trips to Sun City has caused bother for Rooney. Photographers snap him urinating on the course, which is hardly a crime, but the possibility of the pictures appearing in the newspapers agitates the FA and the player’s representatives. Back in the camp, Rooney is struggling with the spare time on his hands and the lack of physical conditioning that is hampering his performance.
Hearing of mounting frustration, Ferguson breaks off from his holiday in America to ring the player. “Relax and enjoy it,” Ferguson says. But the match against Algeria turns into a dire night for Rooney and England.
Forced to watch a goalless draw in which England struggle to string three passes together, the supporters do well to restrain their boos until moments from the final whistle, when another shot by Lampard sails high and wide. But Rooney responds furiously as he walks off, mouthing into a television camera. “Nice to see your own fans booing you,” he snarls. “If that’s what loyal support is, for f***’s sake.”
Moments later, as the players are changing in silence, a fan in a red England away shirt wanders through the dressing-room door. “I’m Pavlos and I actually need the toilet,” Pavlos Joseph tells a startled David Beckham, before deciding to take the opportunity to offload the frustrations of millions back home.
“I thought, ‘What the heck. I’m in the England dressing room. Why not say something?’ I looked David straight in the eye and said, ‘David, we’ve spent a lot of money getting here. This is a disgrace. What are you going to do about it?’ ”
What Capello does is talk repeatedly after the game about the “fear” in his players. He talks about it rather a lot for a man whose job is to banish anxiety. “This is not the England that I know,” he says, damning the performance. “I didn’t see any spirit of the team in this game.”
The players’ response, specifically Terry’s, is to approach Franco Baldini, Capello’s assistant, in the hotel after the match to ask if the players can have a beer to unwind. This is not a normal request in a regime that bans butter and tomato ketchup, but Capello accedes in the hope that it gives his squad some release.
June 20, Royal Bafokeng Sports Campus Where once there was tension, now there is serious agitation. As well as dissatisfaction with the manager, there are growing whispers of factions emerging within the camp.
Two days after the Algeria game, back at the Bafokeng Sports Campus, Terry rocks up for a press conference and the first thing he says is that he is “here on behalf of the players”. The second thing he says is that we are “fully behind the manager”. And the third thing he says, without the slightest encouragement, is that he intends to voice his displeasure at a team meeting that night, suggesting that Capello might have to “change his ways” and that “if it upsets him or any other player, so what?”
Guess what. It infuriated Capello, who would call Terry’s comments “a big mistake”. It also angered a lot of those players on whose behalf Terry purported to be talking — and by no means only Gerrard, the captain. Some within the camp view it as an attack not only on Capello’s authority, but a bid by Terry to reassert his role as the team’s leader, having been stripped of the captaincy in February after revelations about his personal life.
Terry is described by a team-mate as “s***-stirring” and being “bitter” towards Capello over the captaincy.
The purported mutiny does not get off the ground — Terry is talked out of it by team-mates and coaching staff alike — but it is not a happy ship. Terry apologises to the nine players that he named as having joined him in clearing the air over the post-match beer. Not all had done so. Terry feels that players such as Gerrard should have supported him in challenging Capello’s judgment. But with Capello unwilling to listen to Terry’s complaints about matters on and off the pitch, the tensions fester. Instead of discussing changes, including a five-man midfield behind Rooney to improve the possession and passing so lacking against Algeria, everything is left unsaid.
Port Elizabeth, June 23, 2010 Relief. Faced with the threat of elimination, England at last come good — or at least good enough to beat Slovenia 1-0. The goal is set up by James Milner and scored by Jermain Defoe, the players brought into the starting line-up by Capello. For all the talk of unhappiness with the 4-4-2 system, it is, on the whole, a decent team performance.
Terry leads his team-mates in forming a huddle at the final whistle, celebrating their place in the knockout stages, but a last-ditch goal by Landon Donovan against Algeria confirms the United States as group winners. For England, having finished second, the route looks daunting, with Germany their opponents in the round of 16 and, beyond that, probably Argentina.
Bloemfontein, June 27, 2010 The comeback is shortlived. The wretched truth is writ large on the scoreboard: Germany 4, England 1. Capello’s ageing team have been annihilated by the youthful exuberance of Özil and Müller, the energy of Bastian Schweinsteiger and the clinical finishing of Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski.
There is a caveat, with Lampard having been unfairly denied a legitimate goal at 2-1 down, but England have been outfought, out-thought and outclassed by a younger team. No one, apart from Capello, dwells on the assistant referee’s mistake.
It is England’s worst result at a World Cup. The back four have produced a performance of stunning ineptitude. Lampard merits sympathy in an attacking sense, but he, Gerrard and Barry offered the defence no protection. And Rooney looks like a young man for whom the 2010 World Cup, like that in Germany four years earlier, will be looked back upon as a nightmare.
Rooney, at 24, is young enough to think that, one day, he might do himself justice on the world stage, but Gerrard, Lampard and others, the wrong side of 30, cannot say the same. It feels like the end of a team who promised much but have delivered nothing when it mattered. It is the most experienced squad England have sent to a World Cup, but they have performed like terrified novices.
Earlier in the tournament, after the draw with Algeria, Capello had talked of them playing with “fear”. To that, add recklessness and indiscipline.
It is a very English failure. If anything, it seemed to be a throwback to the McClaren era, even if some players were eager to let it be known that the fault lay with Capello, with a lack of pre-match drilling at odds with his previous attention to detail, and with man-management that veered from the unbearably intense to the bizarre offers of eve-of-match beers. Yet, whatever the regime, it seems to come back to a truth that England are never as good as they think they are.
So why are we standing here asking Capello whether he has a future as England manager? Why are we acting as if he is the problem in all of this, as if turning to Roy Hodgson (bound for Liverpool), Harry Redknapp (due in court this year on a charge of tax evasion) or anyone else is going to make things any better?
And why is the FA telling Capello that he must wait 14 days to learn if he can continue as England manager, even though four weeks ago it did away with the escape clause, so convinced was the governing body of his qualities?
Fine, sack Capello if you like. He has made mistakes — some small, some big — and, looking at him yesterday, you were left to wonder whether, at 64, he would have the energy for the rebuilding job ahead.
But show us a manager who has not been diminished by the “impossible job”. Only months or even weeks ago, Capello was being lauded as the man who was proving that phrase to be a fallacy. Now he waits to find out if he will be dismissed by an organisation for which one senior FA official spoke during these turbulent past weeks and said: “If Fabio Capello cannot turn England into winners, who on earth can?”
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