Fabio Capello has, undoubtedly, been a very successful club manager in the past. His travails at the World Cup suggest that he hasn’t quite got the hang of international management yet. In South Africa, England fielded centre-backs with no recent international experience (Ledley King and Jamie Carragher). Their inclusion is symptomatic of Capello’s main failing as an international manager, which is an apparent lack of planning. If he really wanted Carragher (or, for that matter, Paul Scholes) back, why did he wait until he was about to name his squad for the finals to ask?
Germany thumped England with devastating coherence and synergy in the second round with a team containing a mixture of Bayern Munich’s Champions League nearly men and players who won the Under-21 Championship in 2009. Germany, though, had nothing on Spain who started six Barcelona players (seven if you include David Villa) in the teams’ semi-final, or, if you prefer, six players who had also started their European Championships final two years previously.
In spite of Spain and Germany’s success, neither the much-maligned Fabio Capello nor the maligning fans and newspapers seem to have caught on to the idea of coherence as a recipe for success.
English pundits, journalists and fans are always clamouring for the current vogue players to be called up. Capello has so far shown himself quite happy to pander to them, having called up 55 different players by the end of his first qualifying campaign.
I remember attending, at the beginning of the 1997-98 season, a game between Aberdeen and Hibernian at Pittodrie where the away fans sang “Charnley for Scotland”, throughout. James Callaghan ‘Chic’ Charnley, infamous as British football’s most red-carded player, was enjoying a late-career renaissance. Aged 34, he played 29 games that season for Hibs and did score, I seem to remember, a stunning 30-yard lob in an early season game. That Scotland, about to qualify for the World Cup for the last time, should require a player at this stage of his career for the first time seemed incredible but for a few late summer weeks the media got behind the Hibs fans’ call for their midfield heartbeat to be granted some twilight recognition in the form of a Scotland cap. Mercifully, Scotland’s experienced manager Craig Brown was able to resist the calls.
For me, Charnley’s swansong season is best remembered for birthing the best edition of that most engrossing of simulations, Championship Manager. In 97-98 the game was struggling to adjust to the newly instituted Bosman Ruling and every close season saw the great and the good migrating around the world for low transfer fees and high wages. I enjoyed nothing more in my pre-teenage years than trawling through the lists of ‘Players Released’ searching for ageing Serie A stars with no thought for how they would fit into my team. Beppe Signori was a personal favourite even though my ahead-of-its-time 4-2-3-1 formation could scarcely accommodate another ‘Forward (Right)’.
There was literally nothing more thrilling to my 12 year-old soul than landing a big name marquee signing for nothing (a late-career Dennis Bergkamp arriving in Aberdeen was a particular highlight). It seems that Capello, perhaps because he is (unlike Craig Brown) a club manager at heart, still finds this sort of narcissistic novelty irresistible.
As an international manager who, like the Championship Manager, is for the most part unable to work with his charges, Capello spends his time watching games and working through endless permutations of personnel for his next squad.
‘A lot of the other managers in this hospitality box seem to be watching Jordan Henderson’, he thinks. ‘People keep saying that this Jack Wilshere kid is a lot like Andres Iniesta’, he muses.
Fabio realizes that he can have both these players in his squad for nothing! The thrill of this is overwhelming and in they go. Their names look great alongside those of more established stars like Gerrard and Lampard and Capello congratulates himself, like I once did, on having acquired such a valuable collection of talent.
This sounds great, except that the highly-paid foreigner currently in charge of England, again like the geeky 12 year-old pretending to manage Aberdeen in his parents’ study, has no real taste for legacy. As a result of this, instead of being handed starts and the chance to become the building blocks for England’s next World Cup team, Wilshere and Henderson will in all likelihood accrue a handful of minutes of substitute appearances between them while Gerrard/Lampard and Barry/Carrick etc. struggle manfully on in central midfield.
When later editions of Championship Manager became more sophisticated players started to become unhappy at never being picked and boards stopped indulging the exorbitant wage demands of former European Player of the Year substitutes. This forced me to resist the attractions of having every good player made available to me in my squad. It took great self-discipline but I learned to let Elber leave Bayern Munich for Real Madrid (I had already taken Ronaldo from them after all) or to allow Pavel Nedved to join Manchester United for nothing so that Kim Kallstrom could continue his development behind the strikers.
As Champ Man matured, so did I. Just as I learned to stop topping up my squad every summer with players I had no intention of fitting into my team, so Fabio Capello has to stop picking players just because he can. If he picks Henderson and Wilshere he should have the conviction to play them together in the centre of midfield so they can start to learn to play together. If he doesn’t want to play them, he may as well leave them to work on their understanding of one another’s games in the under-21s.
Championship Manager wasn’t quite as fun after I stopped collecting players and my time in football, like Chic Charnley’s, has never again reached the highs of 97-98, but sacrificing that sort of fun doesn’t seem like too much to ask for six million pounds a year does it?
This is a guest post from Calum Mechie, the man behind Good Feet for a Big Man.
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Great stuff. Thoroughly agree with you - just wish I’d had the idea for this one first.
Thanks Ethan. I wrote that before the squad came out, it’s even worse than I thought! Jay Bothroyd? Please!