Fabio Capello faces mission impossible - only a place in the World Cup Final itself will be enough for him
By Rob Draper, Mail on Sunday Chief Football Writer
Fabio Capello has his sights set firmly on the Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg next summer and the evening of Sunday, July 11; it is the date of the World Cup final and he expects his England team to be one if the participants.
Not since Alf Ramsey famously predicted that England would win the World Cup prior to 1966 has an England manager allowed himself such a bold boast. Asked what would constitute success for him next summer, Capello replied instantly: ‘To arrive at the final; to play the final.’
As for winning it, that can wait. ‘To play in it would be enough . . . for now,’ he added, breaking from his usual earnest demeanour into laughter.
For a man who is principally concerned with dampening down expectations after England’s spectacular 5-1 win over Croatia last week, it was a bullish response and all the more startling as Capello is not given to exaggerating England’s hopes of ending what will be, by next July, a 44-year wait for a second World Cup.
Privately, Capello himself would acknowledge there are significant troubles which will bedevil England over the next year. He would never say so in public, but the goalkeeper is a huge concern, with David James, at 39, not the ideal man on which to build a foundation. However, neither Robert Green nor Ben Foster look good enough yet to challenge him.
The lack of a goalscoring centre-forward worries him less. Capello is not given to overt displays of emotion or sentiment, but when Emile Heskey left the pitch on Wednesday after an hour of dutiful service, Capello clasped his hand with vigour, slapped him on the back and only just fell short of embracing him. All this for a man who has scored just seven goals in 56 games over 10 years for England.
‘Heskey is extremely important in the system we play,’ said Capello. ‘He’s very important because of his movement and the balls he plays. He does it well, very well. No, he is not a goalscorer. But he helps the goals of the others.’
At the back, Capello went to great lengths to support Glen Johnson, claiming he was ‘in a good moment of form’, but he knows full well that his defensive capabilities are suspect. And not just Johnson. In the previous two friendly matches, John Terry, Rio Ferdinand and Joleon Lescott were criticised angrily by the manager in the dressing room for their positioning.
Capello was furious with defensive indiscipline shown by Terry and Ferdinand at the end of the Holland game, when, with England having come back from two down to square the game at 2-2, both centre-halves pushed up for a corner. ‘That was really stupid,’ he said. ‘If Holland had scored, they would have been better off not coming back to the dressing room.’
The same apoplexy seized him when Slovenia scored late at Wembley last weekend, and Terry, as well as the more obvious culprits Johnson and Lescott, bore the brunt of his rage.
Yet, perhaps just as important as the goalkeeping situation, a weakness at right-back and a centre-forward who does not score goals is the curse of the English game.
Almost inevitably, one of his key players — Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Terry or Ferdinand — will be unfit for South Africa. Even if all of them are there, they are likely to be playing at about 90 per cent of their capacity after the demands of a Premier League and Champions League season.
‘The most important thing when you go to the World Cup is the physical condition of the players, that they are fit and fresh,’ said Capello. ‘It is worse in England because we play more games and sometimes the tackles are really, really strong.’
The starkest reality check comes in Capello’s assessment of how many times this England side have actually played in the manner in which he expected in the 18 games he has now overseen.
‘Sometimes we have done so in the second half,’ said the Italian. ‘Against Croatia away we played very well in both halves and also at Wembley on Wednesday. Against Germany we played well and in the second half against Belarus.’
Capello could not recall any further games in which his players have done what he instructed, which means England have achieved what was expected of them in three and a half games out of 18, a hit rate of 19 per cent, which in itself explains his reservations about talking his team up.
‘The players and I stay with our feet on the ground always,’ he said. ‘It’s a long way to arrive at the final, we have to take every moment step by step and forget what we made
before. We won eight games in qualifying, but it’s nothing, absolutely nothing. All that matters is the next game.’
Capello would not compare the consistency of this England side with his greatest team, AC Milan in the years between 1991 and 1996, when he won four Serie A titles and the Champions League.
‘It’s really different because with them I was training every day and you can understand what is good, and work on it. If you make mistakes during the week, you can work on it during the training. Here it’s not easy.’
However, it is safe to say he would have expected the team of Paolo Maldini, Franco Baresi and Marco van Basten to have achieved a greater rate for fulfilling their potential than one in every five games.
He is also aware that the country lurches from contempt for its national team to premature acclamation of its self-evident greatness, depending on the most recent result. It is why a 5-1 win over Croatia was celebrated quietly with his wife, Laura, and a small group of friends at a restaurant.
There was no champagne. ‘Just a glass of wine,’ said Capello. ‘It’s one step, nothing more. We have to forget everything, look forward.’
That said, having qualified in unprecedented style, Capello has gone some way to deconstructing the myth of the impossible job.
‘I never understood why it was impossible to do something here,’ he said. ‘Because you have the players, the stadium, the people, the fans.’
Reaching a World Cup final would represent a quantum leap in performance; contemplating what might lie beyond that is too incredible to ponder at present.
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