On one hand, you could sense it was possible. The dispute between him and the FA over John Terry and the captaincy had erupted when he made comments to Italian television station RAI. But it didn’t seem that serious. Talks with David Bernstein could have ended with a parting of the ways, and so it proves. But we still didn’t really expect it.
Particularly after Harry Redknapp was acquitted just hours earlier for tax evasion, thus paving the way for the Tottenham manager to take up the England job. Of course Redknapp being Redknapp, he refused to be drawn on it today when the Tottenham manager insisted he had a job to focus on. But unlike Pardew, he didn’t say ‘it’s not for me.’
Of course it’s for him. The job is practically made for him. A team who are fragmented and divided, and inept tactically, require a manager who won’t focus on endless tactical drills and will pull them together. Redknapp is perfect.
But Capello, why now? He didn’t seem happy, that’s for sure, ever since the World Cup in 2010 when he discovered his players were incapable of entertaining themselves when isolated from the outside world. And he didn’t seem to fit into the England role. He is a manager who understands tactics, who wants his players to play a certain way. But trying to get the England team to adhere to complex tactical instructions is like trying to get a cat to bark. It isn’t going to happen. He wasn’t right.
The players didn’t seem to take to him and the media storm which was created after the World Cup made his position untenable. The English media is unforgiving, and once he had lost them, with his poor grasp of English, his chances of remaining in the post for too long were never going to be particularly high. Keeping the media onside is absolutely fundamental for an England manager.
Capello leaves with a legacy. A divided dressing room complicated by the John Terry affair. Capello guided England to two major competitions, and came up short whilst there as his tournament experience was not good or suited to English players. As one sports writer put it on Friday, “he did not like the English, and the English did not like him.”
And as another newspaper said, it’s “Harriverderci.”
