Im glad we are out because every time I saw Capello I kept having flashbacks to a Sunday afternoon TV game show.
Jim ‘Great smashing super’ Bowen had a fling with Dot Cotton from Eastenders whilst holidaying in Rimini and nine months later.
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England players: Well we have had a lovely day Fabio but if you don’t mind we will not gamble for the star prize and just take the money instead.
Fabio: Great, smashing, super well lets take a look at what you could have won!
To be honest I didn’t give England a hope of achieving much at this World Cup once Capello announced who had made his final squad for the Holiday to South Africa, players who had endured bad seasons at their clubs and had even played out relegation dog fights where picked alongside the same tired old faces who still don’t turn in a decent International performance no matter how many times this and every other manager has felt the need fit to pick them.
Capello should have tried to find different options months ago, new players and a plan B where a must if we wanted to progress to the latter stages, but he found neither and we have paid the price for once again not being progressive and forward thinking when it comes to the world stage.
A rigid 4-4-2 is English in style but how often do our players actually play it anymore? And if you are going to play it you certainly don’t have Rooney up front with Heskey in support because no matter how much Rooney is praised and lauded as the saviour of our nation he is not an out and out forward even if he did have a good scoring record for the Mancs last season.
Shearer, Owen and Lineker are what I would call free scoring forwards and I could have seen Rooney being a magnificent partner for any of those three players as the burden of leading the line is removed from him and he would be free to roam and just one look at the goal scoring record for England tells you we where never going to score many goals with Heskey and Rooney up front and although it was later rectified by employing Defoe in place of Heskey Wayne had long since let his mind wander to the plane journey back home.
Jermaine is what I would call a goal scorer but to then take Rooney, Heskey and Crouch as well was negative in the extreme and surely Bent would have been a better option than either Heskey or Crouch.
The midfield options had a similar look to them as Capello refused to try anything new and the same old line up appeared game after game, Gerrard played mostly inside against the USA scored a goal and had a good game Capello is obviously unhappy at this because against Algeria Stevie is glued to the left flank unable to influence the game or get involved in his promising partnership with Rooney and so all our creativity is left in the boots of Barry and Lampard. Why didn’t we take a winger out there? I would have loved to have seen Adam Johnson given a go, a natural winger who could have gone out to the left side and released Gerrard to other duties, yes Johnson is young and inexperienced but lets be honest is he anymore inexperienced than Germanys rising star Mesut Oezil? He is 21 years old and only has 14 caps but he is fast becoming one of the stars of the tournament.
Defensively I thought we where doomed before a ball was kicked, two of our keepers play for clubs that struggled all season but they where again played ahead of a keeper who had the best season by far of the three but was again overlooked because of his inexperience, then why the bloody hell did we take him?
The back four positions where often just as bemusing and to see King, Upson and even our own Carra start games whilst Dawson could only watch on was frankly unreal, King is injury prone in the extreme, Upson makes Titus Bramble look like Beckenbauer and as upsetting as it is to admit Carra’s days are numbered at Liverpool so what Capello thought he could do at international level I don’t know.
I’m not one for getting on the ‘sack the manager’ bandwagon but, who picked the squad? Who picks the team? Who organises the tactics? Who motivates the team? Who has to make snap in game decisions?
Capello is second to none at club management level but guiding England through qualifying against a goat herders eleven and some of the ‘Stan’ teams only to explode the minute we meet some quality clearly indicates to me he is not up to the job and I hope and pray that he is now sacked and they instead install Roy Hodgson, a man who knows English players very well, a man who knows and understands the English mentality but most importantly a man who’s coming here unless we can palm him off to the FA first.
