FA chiefs must now turn to Hodgson
FABIO CAPELLO will sit down with FA chairman Sir Dave Richards over the next few days to decide how to take this England team forward.
But, sadly, it’s going to take a lot more than a brief discussion over tea and biscuits as the answer is this England team can simply not go forward with Capello in charge.
No team has ever won the World Cup with a foreign manager and England showed just why in Bloemfontein yesterday.
Capello came into this World Cup with no game plan and no fixed starting line-up, and his failure to communicate properly with the players was all to evident in a lack of understanding in every area of the park.
What can he say to the players at half-time to get them going? It needed an inspirational figure and I just don’t think Fabio Capello has been particularly inspirational to this group of players this World Cup.
Personally, I think his 4-4-2 wasn’t clever enough for international football and he ran out of options. Not taking an out-and-out left midfield player to South Africa limited him when it came to Steven Gerrard, and I think bringing on a non-goalscorer in Emile Heskey for a goalscorer in Jermain Defoe, just when we needed a goal, pretty much summed up his tournament.
What did Peter Crouch ever do wrong? He didn’t get a sniff.
RESPECTED
So what now? We need a new freshness, new ideas, a new approach. Like Germany have done, we need to ditch the old guard and build a developing team for the future.
The simple fact is we are not as good as we tend to think we are. Our players are simply add-ons in a foreign-based Premier League and our idea of ‘world class’ is tinged somewhat with bias.
For me, there’s no-one better to get the best out of these up-and-coming players than Roy Hodgson. Roy is being linked with the vacant Liverpool job, but if that is not the case and he is available, then the FA should bring him in.
Certainly his face fits, he’s at a good age, has experience of international football and is well respected by the players he’ll be working with.
Or, how about Harry Redknapp? He is in the same mould as Ray, hugely respected, but I just wonder whether this pending court case will go against him.
Either way, the FA need to act, and now. Capello has not earned his £6m-a-year wages in South Africa, it’s been nothing short of a shambles.