BRIAN GLANVILLE
writes for worldsoccer.com each week.
TOO MANY COOKS?
19/12/07
Always one of the Premiership matches of the season as Liverpool. play host to Manchester United. this Sunday. Click here for latest match betting!
And now, Capello. Having known, liked and appreciated him for some 35 years, I am glad to see him appointed; even if his accompanying entourage may seem excessive. Why, you wonder, does he need all these people and why has a somewhat supine FA allowed him to bring them? There are some who feel that his salary of £4 million net of tax a year is also excessive and that it could have been reduced, had the FA negotiators not been in such a tearing and even self-abasing hurry to conclude the deal. After all, you hear some critics says, Capello at the time of his appointment was unemployed and could well have been brought in for a substantially lower sum.
As for the entourage, my salient thought is that when Alf Ramsey won the only World Cup that England are ever likely to win, it was with just one assistant, the Middlesbrough trainer, Harold Shepherdson. Why you wonder does Capello need to bring with him a director of football and what will that director do that Capello could not do himself, especially as Fabio is known to be so much his own man and one who, as his former Milan player Marcel Desailly has emphasised, doesn’t take counsel from any quarter? Why pray should there be a fitness trainer, for the relatively small number of games played by any England team, when every club has a fitness trainer, anyway. And much though I like the new goalkeeping coach, Franco Tancredi, once a Roma and Italy goalkeeper of talent, modesty and charm, why does England need to bring in a goalkeeping coach from abroad?
You might say that the incumbent whom Tancredi has deposed, Ray Clemence, has hardly furnished England with keepers of reliability and quality. Remember the costly and appalling errors of Paul Robinson, the horrific lapse by an insufficiently grounded successor at Wembley. But Clemence could hardly be blamed, first, because any manager more alert and logical than the inept McClaren would long since have dropped Robinson rather than continue to dice with death by picking him. Secondly, because as I have suggested, Carson had no time to adjust.
I am convinced that England rather than being mismanaged by McClaren would have been better off with no manager at all. For managers can, beyond doubt, do harm as well as good. Note that between the wars, over a period of some twenty years, England had no manager, yet never lost a home game against a foreign team. A selection committee picked the side, for better or for worse, after which it was down to the players to work matters out and, as experienced professionals, they were surely able to do so. True, this was not the case in other, European, countries, where a powerful manager often ruled supreme. Notably Vittorio Pozzo as commissario tecnico in Italy, a shrewd strategist and an even shrewder psychologist (what earthly function did McClaren’s psychologist serve, not least in the case of the affronted Jamie Carragher?)
In 1947, there at last came the appointment of Walter Winterbottom, the protégé, and if you like poodle of the all powerful FA secretary, Stanley Rous. For an almost incredible 16 years Walter remained in charge, never for all his intelligence a strategist of any note. Horribly exposed by the 6-3 and 7-1 defeats by the Hungarians in 1953 and 1954; when little Yorkshireman George Raynor took his depleted Swedes to Budapest, two weeks before the 6-3 rout at Wembley, and got a 2-2 draw. Would things have been any worse without Winterbottom, whose job in fact as you may recall, Rous in Rome offered to the then manager Jesse Carver, in my presence, in May 1955?
Capello has always been ready to cast a cold eye over England and their methods. In June 1973 after he had scored in Turin Italy’s second goal in their first victory over England in 40 years, he told me he found the English tactics mechanical, lacking a Bobby Charlton to spray the ball about, taking too long to get to crossing positions, and then missing a player like Terry Cooper, who could beat his man and put theball over. Even if he did describe Terry, an overlapping full back, as a winger.
After England had feebly lost to Holland in the West German European finals of 1988, Fabio told me he was amazed y the lack of rabbia, rage, and reaction of an England teach which was facing defeat. What one profoundly hopes is that he calls the bluff of David Beckham and doesn’t award him the 100th cap he craves in the coming friendly at Wembley against Switzerland. Objectively, Beckham already has ten caps too many, and owed the last few to McClaren’s irrational obsession with him. There are several young English right flankers at the moment, not least Blackburn’s lively David Bentley, who are fully deserving of a place. Sprawled in his underpants across those posters, going on tour with the egregious Spice Girls, Beckham of late has hardly been leading a footballer’s life though he aims to put that right by training with Arsenal at London Colney. Pick him, though, and Capello’s image as the Iron Man, scourge of the likes of Di Canio and Del Piero, will be seriously damaged.
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The FA are now throwing the book at Luton Town, but what of their own bizarre behaviour in the case? Luton’s long suffering, long serving, dedicated Secretary had altered them many months ago to what had been going on, but she informs us?? That nothing was done at all. Physician, heal thyself.
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The sudden appointment of Capello, by Trevor Brooking – who would well have made a good England manager himself – and by the unconvincing Brian Barwick has infuriated Sir Dave Richards, vice chairman of the FA and President of the Premiership. But what right has a board member to be consulted when, two weeks before the abject surrender by England to Croatia, he informed us that McClaren was “doing a bloody good job”?
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Quite why Chelsea, ie Abramovich, has just given Avram Grant a hugely lucrative and extensive managerial contract is beyond me. As indeed is the fact that Chelsea let Mourinho go, his fate of course was sealed on the occasion that Aston Villa popped in their second goal at Villa Park, whereupon Abramovich rose from his directorial seat and strode – flounced? – out of the stadium.
But if the somewhat dour and pedestrian Grant is delivering a more adventurous sort of football, as he promises us, I have yet to see it. Above all, the success or failure of the team so heavily depends on the presence or absence of the irresistible Didier Drogba. To choose, in his absence – to be prolonged when he goes to the African Nations Cup – poor, waning Andrei Shevchenko, and leaving him alone up front (whatever Grant claims, this is not by an stretch of the imagination a 4-3-3 formation) verges on cruelty.
But I suppose the wishes of Abramovich, who presumably insisted on buying him for over £30 million from a surely delighted Milan, have to be obeyed. Still, even Grant could hardly be blamed for the astonishing and so untypical error by his keeper, Cech, when he missed that corner against Arsenal.
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Brian's latest book is England Managers. The book is published by Headline and is available online and in all good bookstores.
A new revised edition of Brian Glanville's definitive World Cup book, The Story of the World Cup, has just been published and is available from all good bookshops.
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