Earn your Cash-pello

On a salary of £6m a year, Fabio Capello is by far the highest paid manager in International football. So, what are we spending this money on?


Similar to Sven, Capello cannot be blamed for the sums the FA put into his offshore account. Similarly to Sven, he can be blamed for questions being raised as to why we are paying him such an amount.


Prior to the World Cup a table emerged showing the figures earned by the various competing coaches in the tournament. It threw up some interesting reading. In top spot - by a distance - was our man Fab, who at the time of being offered the England job had been unemployed for over a year after being sacked and sitting on a lucrative pay-off from Real Madrid.


In second spot, on less than half of Capello, is none other than Marcelo Lippi, currently governing Capello’s motherland, Italy. Lippi took over the Azzurri in 2008, and the sceptic in you may suggest that had our ingenious FA not dived in and offered Capello such an inflated wage to land us the World Cup, he would have been jostling with Lippi to take over from Roberto Donadoni, albeit earning a fraction on life at Soho Square. The numeric’s and how they come to be, only add ire when you digest Tuesday night’s insipid performance over Montenegro.


Now, the World Cup has been and gone and for all of the various failings from all involved, Capello is still at the helm. If we are to move forward, we need a fresh start, a clean sheet - which is just as well given there was little evidence of clean sheets to be found anywhere in Bloemfontein.


The new-ish era got off in good enough fashion with seven goals notched against Bulgaria and Switzerland, yet against a side ranked below Gabon and Burkina Faso, the bland, basic and primitive way England went about dealing with Montenegro meant it was hard not to look back into the black.


32 months and 32 games since he first took charge of the Three Lions, what improvements could we see for a nigh on £15m investment? (not forgetting the money spent on his battalion of hand picked backroom staff and assistants; scouts, coaches, physicians, dieticians, advisors, agents, travel costs, property rental, medical care, insurance premiums and expenses) Not much.


Bar winning the World Cup – better make that the European Championships now – the only other way the FA can justify the money lavished on the Capello project is if there were tangible signs of progress and development under what they triumphantly declared a ‘world class coach’ upon his arrival.


Watching the Montenegro game did not strike me as progress, but instead gave me a harrowing de ja vu experience to the Graham Taylors car crash. A flat back four in a straight line seemingly afraid to have possession of the ball. Two deep midfielders stood next to each other with a phobia of the opposition box. Two wingers ineffectively hugging touchlines but stationed wide at all times to supply a steady trickle of miscued crosses in the vicinity of two strikers woefully isolated by the restrictions imposed on the rest. It was not a good look.


There were too many long balls; the passing wasn’t quick enough, accurate enough, incisive enough or good enough. The formation was too rigid, options too few, ideas too predictable and thus chances too scarce. Any signs of the subtle and intelligent inter-play and inter-changing that hallmarks today’s best club and international sides could not be traced. Neither could any sense of progress.


Most worrying of all was Capello’s myopic view of the whole thing. It was patently obvious, if not before the game then certainly after the opening exchanges, that the Montenegrins had come for a point, and would display very limited attacking intent. Nevertheless a back four remained in place throughout, with the only substitutions being one big target man for another, and the replacement of one flying but infuriating winger for another. Mystifyingly Jack Wilshere remained on the bench throughout. Joe Cole didn’t even make the bench.


In two and a half years very little has changed and it would be difficult to pinpoint any significant strides forward. For a supposedly world class coach, Capello has not got his team playing any better than they were previously, his tactics and tactical decisions are questionable, squad selection debateable, and impact derisory.


The final nail, should I need to nail the lid any more down in my opinion, is what the man has done to his men. Once described as a golden generation - now more an egg-yolk yellow - we still undoubtedly have a pool of world class footballers in our ranks. Most sides in the world either club or country would welcome a Ferdinand, a Terry, a Cole, a Lampard, a Gerrard or a Rooney into their eleven. Yet how many have played to their potential? How many have improved individually or collectively? How many of them have flourished under Capello’s tutelage? Not one.


The £6 million bucks stop with you Fabio.