By Chris Wright

Fabio Capello’s four-year England tenure over the course of 20 (you must promise here and now not to count them!) fabulous photos…

So long Fabio, and thanks for all the fish. Farewell and good luck.

[Photos: PA]

                          

By Chris Wright

You turn your back for one second and what happens? Just three months and three friendly games before Euro 2012 gets under way in June, Fabio Capello resigned as England manager last night after spending the afternoon bickering with FA chairman David Bernstein and general secretary Alex Horne at Wembley over his comments made to the Italian media vis-a-vis the FA’s premature decision to strip John Terry of the national captaincy.

The FA released the following statement:

“The Football Association can confirm that Fabio Capello has today resigned as England manager.

“The discussions focused on the FA Board’s decision to remove the England team captaincy from John Terry, and Fabio Capello’s response through an Italian broadcast interview.

“In a meeting for over an hour, Fabio’s resignation was accepted and he will leave the post of England manager with immediate effect.”

Capello felt undermined, so did Bernstein and Horne. They employ him. He got canned. That seems to be the long and short of it.

The FA, the English press and Capello; It was a loveless tri-pronged marriage from the offing. One of the great, weeping epics of our time. Like a husband and wife (and wife), growing old and decrepit together while the relationship gradually becomes utterly sapped of requited romance - only continuing to sleep in the same bed at night as he’s handy to have around when the fuses need changing and she’s willing to do all the household paperwork. By the end, they all despised each other.

It’s over. Rightly or wrongly, it’s over. Capello leaves behind him the best winning ratio of any permanent England manager ever (66.67%, beating Sir Alf’s 61.1%), breezing through two separate qualification campaigns with ne’er a hitch while losing only two competitive matches during his 41-game, four-year tenure.

The fractious World Cup debacle is an albatross he’ll have to bear, though the contributing factors are myriad and the blame is to be shared out equally. Capello went in with a distant, disciplinarian modus operandi and the players weren’t malleable or willing enough to conform. It just didn’t work.

And so, quite naturally it would seem, our thoughts turn to Harry Redknapp – who is, unfortunately for those of us who perish the thought, the only real outstanding candidate for the post. If this morning’s Tweets are anything to go by, all the major players (Rooney, Ferdinand, etc) want Redknapp sworn in post haste as well as every single journalist in the land – though leaving an ascendant Tottenham in the lurch will undoubtedly be a wrench.

It seems Arry’s reluctance to go in for the whole ‘drafting up in-depth player dossiers and tactical gubbins bordering on telemetry’ approach is proving to be a popular prospect for a dumb squad who just couldn’t deal with Capello’s rigorous scrutiny.

Is Redknapp a better, more thorough manager and tactician than Capello? No, absolutely not. Is he more likely to see this current crop of England internationals through the Euro 2012 group stage on a wave of brevity and BANTAAAH! Quite possibly.

The whispers on the wind are that Stuart Pearce will be taking temporary charge of England for their friendly against Holland at the end of February, with a decision being made on the course of action imminent shortly after.

(UPDATE: The FA have just confirmed that Pearce will be put in temporary charge for the Holland game.)

My personal prediction? Redknapp will take charge for Euro 2012 on a temporary basis and then return to Spurs for pre-season. England will do ‘the usual’, exit with a whimper and Arry will get off scot free (again) as it was all Capello’s big, slab-faced fault for upsetting the nation’s apple cart so close to the start of the tournament. The excuse is ready-made and nigh-on irrefutable.

Any thoughts folks?

                          

By Chris Wright

“You come to me, my youngest son, and ask me to attend the wedding of my youngest son? Get….OUT!!!”

Word has it, or rather, the Independent has it that Fabio Capello is ducking out of his youngest son’s wedding to watch England get mauled to bits by Spain at Wembley on Saturday – a game, it’s perhaps worth pointing out, that is nowt more than a friendly.

Pierfilippo, 36, is tying the knot with his long-term partner Tiziana (Crudeli?) in Milan (It is T-Crud!) on Saturday, which wouldn’t have been a problem as England’s game was originally pencilled in for Friday. However, the Spanish FA had it nudged back a day to give their Barcelona contingent time to recover from their Copa del Rey excursions against L’Hospitalet tonight.

According to the Indy, Pierfilippo has taken the news rather well, saying it’s ‘absolutely not a problem’ that his old man won’t be in attendance as the couple already have two kids together and the wedding is just a ‘formality’.

And they say romance is dead!

                          

By Chris Wright

After missing the entire 1993/94 season with a chronic ankle injury, Milan leggenda Marco van Basten was coerced into ruling himself out Holland’s ’94 World Cup squad that summer and was eventually forced to admit defeat in his bid to recover following several surgeries – officially announcing his retirement from the game (aged just 28) on August 17th, 1995 after spending another year in fruitless rehabilitation.

The Dutch artisan was paraded around the pitch at the San Siro one last time shortly after, which proved to be an occasion so emotionally weighted that it even cracked the stoic, paving-slab face of one Fabio Capello…

And it would surely be remiss to mention the great Van Basten without a little reminder of his genius…

Video shamelessly nabbed from @James_Dart

                          

By Alex Netherton

I forgot my mantra. For the last few years, basically since Ashley Cole almost drove his car off the road with righteous £5k indignation, my mind music has been, ‘I hope England lose tonight.’ Even the 340 days they weren’t playing, I was always quietly repeating it in the hope that Austria might pop up to dismantle England in a surprise 2-0 victory while the England team were up to their nuts in prostitutes’ guts.

The main reason that I wanted England to lose, more than the players and their habitual confirmation that they were failing both their Mensa test and then failing forgetting their drugs tests, was the fans. Jesus, the fans. I hate English fans so much that I break into a cold sweat when I see their putrid ‘one arm punching the air, then the other arm punching the air,’ dance of petty xenophobia. I hate hearing their voices so much that it now extends to almost all cases of spoken English. When I go on honeymoon in France next week, I’m tempted to not even listen to my wife when she speaks in English just to make the most of my motherland break.

Inextricably linked with fan loathing is the tabloid press. Easy targets, sure. They write to their audience, and the audience is bloody thick. But, when they turned on Fabio Capello, I could see reasons why they might be able to criticise him: he’d shown a remarkable lack of flexibility, and there’s a good chance that he really has gone lame tactically, but they didn’t really get at him for that.

What they went after him for was achieving progress to the same stage as England usually get to, the first couple of rounds of the knock out stages of a major tournament. Then they lost to a palpably superior side, as they usually do.

Why had he done that? There are a few fairly obvious reasons:

He’d done that as the players who performed well when surrounded by intelligent and invariably foreign players at their clubs, no longer had their brainy mates to get them through thoughtful encounters. He’d done that as their finest player, Wayne Rooney, was coming back from injury and, we now know, could well have had an inkling that a shitstorm was brewing over his private life. He’d done that as Stuart ‘lucky mascot’ Pearce offered him tactical advice by standing up, then sitting down, then standing up.

So why did the tabloids and most England fans think it was worth going at him? Because Fabio Capello isn’t English. Worse than that, he doesn’t jig about on the sidelines like other successful international managers – Vicente del Bosque, Aime Jacquet, Otto Rehhagel and Luiz Felipe Scolari are all notorious for jumping up and down when their team scores. Books have been written about it.

Another reason: he talks in a foreign accent. Really? Brilliant. I’d not considered that, but on reflection I’m not convinced. I mean, the England players do spend every working day in the company of their foreign mates. Maybe, I guess, given the foreign players probably speak erudite English, it doesn’t help JT, SWP and Stevie Me. They speak vermin.

Another reason: he’s not Harry Redknapp. Harry Redknapp has played one proper European game and before that got shown up by Young Boys because he’s only just got the hang of tactics, and only because he had them handed to him, along with his arse, by the Swiss team a few weeks ago. Harry Redknapp goes out of his way to psychologically destroy decent players, Pavluychenko being the most recent. However much he might want his next stop to be at Wembley, it won’t, it’ll be in court, which everyone handily forgets when mentioning his name. Who else are we gonna get who’s English? Phil Brown? Actually, I think that might work, but that’s my sickness.

Another thing that kicks off a right radge in ma heed is the patronising disdain the press and pricks have for Capello, the condescending contempt to call him a Jackass. Beyond the fact that ignoring Andy Carroll and Jack Wilshere – both players recently in trouble for acting the twat off the field – was totally justified, that’s a stunning lack of respect shown. This is a man who’s won the Champions League and numerous national titles. The only time he’s had trouble is when the players available to him are only English. In essence, out of England players and Fabio Capello, he’s not the one who’s shit. I fantasise that in 2012, Capello gets his winners’ medals and £6 million cheque for the year’s work, slaps them on the table at the press conference, and saunters off flicking the most content and aggressively insouciant Vs at this country.

So given this country’s attack on cogent throught, I’ve ended up thinking myself a charlatan. I’m behind England. When they played the other day I was slyly hoping that England would run out 10-0 winners from then until the European Championship finals. I was desperate to see Capello succeed. Why? Because this is what I think is going on in Shaun Custis’ head when he watches England win…

‘An England manager, from another country? And we can’t replace him with an England manager yet? Oh my Christ, get me the Derringer, I can’t go on. What do you mean a Derringer is a foreign gun? What the FUCK AM I GOING TO DO?’

Alex also writes for the Sabotage Times

                          

By Chris Wright

Joe Hart: The young ‘keeper wasn’t made to face a barrage, but his assured demeanour allowed you to afford the kind of confidence in him that you wouldn’t allow yourself to feel toward his immediate predecessors David James and Robert Green. Went about the routine elements of his trade consummately and without fanfare, punctuating his performance with a couple of good saves (from Dimitar Rangelov and Glen Johnson). 8/10

Glen Johnson: Rather worryingly, we still see far too much of the ‘old Glen Johnson’, especially at international level. Served to reinforce – rather than dictate – a number of attacking moves but was woeful at times when called upon to fulfill his defensive duties. 4.5/10

Michael Dawson: After a nervous opening period, the Tottenham centre-back began to ease into proceedings only to have his resurgence stemmed in the 57th minute by a grotesque looking injury to his knee. As a result, Dawson is almost certain to miss England’s second qualifier with Switzerland next Tuesday. 6/10

Phil Jagielka: The Everton man’s performance belied his relative international experience. Imperious in the air, quick across the ground and also displayed a nice line in last-ditch recoveries when needed. Not quite the finished article, but not far off. 7.5/10

Ashley Cole: Did all of his best work in Bulgaria’s half, combining fluidly with Rooney to provide the assist for the opening goal. Persistent going forward and reliable as ever when defending. 7.5/10

Theo Walcott: Despite the ‘new dawn’ he’s apparently undergone at Arsenal this season, I saw no real improvement from Walcott tonight other than his obedient positioning. Will have ‘flattered to decieve’ many onlookers by repeatedly exposing Zhivko Milanov with his pace, but the truth is he did little of consequence when given ample opportunity to do so. 5/10

Steven Gerrard (captain): Played with the kind of freedom and spirit that we haven’t seen him display at international level for a long time. Covered ground like a man possessed and his continual lung-busting runs pulled defenders every which way as England raided forward. Note to Fabio, Frank Lampard need never play for England again. 8/10

Gareth Barry: Disruptive without being influential. Went about his defensive role (a role to which I’m not sure he is particularly well suited) in his usual, understated manner. Did what he had to and nothing more. 6.5/10

James Milner: Mixed some wonderful displays of touch and control with a real eagerness to work himself into the ground, maintaining a very high work-rate until deep into the second half. Technically speaking, he doesn’t look 100% comfortable on the left-wing – but he does a good job of compensating for it. 7.5/10

Jermain Defoe: Opportunistic and athletic for the first goal, pacey and a little fortunate for the second and committed for the third. Showed a little bit of everything but would have struggled for chances if Rooney wasn’t playing as a link-man, such was the high, looping trajectory of many of the crosses that were slung in to him. 8/10

Wayne Rooney: Wasn’t overtly brilliant but still played a part in all four goals, despite a fairly quiet first half. Was almost operating in centre midfield during the closing stages of the game, but continued to pull strings. Needs a goal to get his swagger back. 7.5/10

SUBS

Gary Cahill (Dawson, 57mins): Replaced the prostrate Dawson following his injury and slotted in effortlessly. Looked a little hesitant when it came to distribution, but defended stoutly enough – pulling of a flying block to deflect Stiliyan Petrov’s goal-bound half-volley wide. 6.5/10

Adam Johnson (Walcott, 74mins): Only given quarter-of-an-hour to make an impact, and duly succeeded by notching his first England goal (squeezing a shot past the wrong-footed Nikolay Mihailov) on only his third appearance. 7/10

Ashley Young (Defoe, 87mins): With Defoe having to celebrate his third goal with a limp, the striker was bought off as a precautionary measure. To the best of my knowledge, Young didn’t manage to touch the ball during the 4 or 5 minutes he was on the field. N/A

This article was first published on the excellent Soccerlens, for whom Chris also writes

                          

By Ollie Irish

The best pics of England going through the motions ahead of Friday’s Euro 2012 qualifier against Bulgaria at Wembley:

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England's Joe Hart (left) and Steven Gerrard during the training session at London Colney, London.

Photos: PA

Joe Hart looks more and more like the spiritual captain of that group, somehow. Is there a case for making his the captain, given that he should be first-choice for a very long time? I think so.

How do you think England will fare in their first two Euro 2010 qualfiers, against Bulgaria and Switzerland? Vote below:

                          

THE Sun stepped up it’s subtle ‘Capello Out!’ campaign today with a quite spectacularly abominable article by football hack Shaun Custis, in which England’s manager was branded a ‘Jackass’ (for dropping Jack Wilshere – geddit!), a ‘silly ass’ and a ‘donkey’. You get the idea: from Turnip Taylor, via the Wally with the Brolly, to another hatchet job from Britain’s most popular newspaper.

So never mind that Wilshere has hardly been bringing the thunder for Arsenal so far this season (the Sun awarded him 5/10 for his quiet performance against Liverpool) – can we get a design monkey to put some donkey ears on Fabio, the football editor shouted.

Custis also bemoaned the non-selection of Newcastle striker Andy Carroll. What, Capello should pick Carroll because he’s had one decent game in the top flight? Now that would be the behaviour of a jackass. Carroll’s time will come, but he’s not ready yet.

It’s not the first time a News International publication has made me feel ashamed to be English, and no doubt it won’t be the last. Yes, Capello made some mistakes in the World Cup, and his man-management style isn’t working, but give the guy a break and drop the cheap n’ childish name-calling, please. Don’t let the idiots win.

Even Football365, which is owned by Murdoch, felt the urge to write an open letter to the Sun about its ‘toxic’ Capello piece – and a superb letter it is too.

To help redress the balance, here’s a picture of Custis with a goatee made out of baby shit:

“GORMLESS Custis, 46, stupidly thinks Andy Carroll is ready for England’s senior squad. What an utter IDIOTHOLE the Sun football hack is!

“A source told us: ‘Yes, he is a bit of a SHITFACE, isn’t he.’”

                          

By Ollie Irish

For a while there it looked like England were about to lose on their own patch against a team with a goalkeeper wearing tracksuit bottoms. Holy shit, that would have been embarrassing. Happily for Capello and England, captain Steven Gerrard stepped up to the plate, scoring two goals – the first was good, the second was world-class, the sort of phone-booth finish Kaka might have pulled off in his prime:

I was at Wembley to watch the match (many thanks to our friends at Umbro for that), and I thought it was an enjoyable match, made all the more enjoyable by some panto booing from England’s most ‘special’ fans. Our World Cup flops were booed as their names boomed out over the PA, then there were boos at half-time after no goals were scored, then their were boos when Hungary took the lead (totally against the run of play, by the way). Then Wayne Rooney was booed when he was taken off, prompting Wazza to respond with some very sarcastic applause to all corners of Wembley; strangely, the sarcastic applause put a stop to the boos. Did fans think he was being sincere?

Overall, there were distinct positives for Capello to take away before the Euro 2012 qualifiers kick off next month. Of the new kids, Kieran Gibbs looks a natural international player, while Jack Wilshere was not overawed either. Others who missed out on South Africa really made an effort to show up Capello’s conservative selection: Adam Johnson played without fear, Bobby Zamora gave the Hungarian defenders headaches and almost scored with a sizzling shot, Ashley Young was also lively down the left. Gareth Barry played the full 90 minutes and looked much more like his old self. Ain’t fitness a wonderful thing.

The only players who didn’t convince were Rooney, who needs a break from England (he’s out of love with international football), Phil Jagielka (Jags is not quite international class in my book; I’d rather have seen Gary Cahill) and Frank Lampard; England looked so much better without Lampard slowing things down in the middle of the pitch. If he’s still around for the Euro 2012 finals – and no, I’m not assuming England will qualify – then I will eat several of my own hats. He’s great for Chelsea, yes, but for England he’s simply awful – it’s time to ditch Lampard and bring on youngsters like Jack Rodwell and Tom Huddlestone. Unlike Lampsy, Gerrard proved he has the heart for a fight and he’s welcome to stay for a few years yet.

Photo gallery:

                          

By Ollie Irish

Feel the warmth

More proof of Fabio Capello’s inability to form a meaningful relationship with anything but expensive artwork comes via his admission that he ended David Beckham’s international career, in effect, but without bothering to tell Beckham before he announced it to the world. A bit like when he really wanted that nice young ginger fella to end his England exile, so much so that he got his assistant to make the call, with hardly any time for Scholes to make the call.

Capello said: “I hope when David is okay he can play here the last game at Wembley in a friendly to say goodbye and thank you very much to the crowd.

“I won’t be picking him for any more competitive matches.”

Blunt as ever from the Italian. He went on:

“David is a fantastic player, he was really important, but we have to see the new players for the future because the age is important for a lot of people, not only for David.

“Did I phone him before I went on television? No. I think I will speak with him. We tried to speak with him.

“But I think David knows he has no future with the international team because we have to change. We tried to speak with him.”

And Beckham is one of the players with a supposed good relationship with Capello!? Wow. The Italian is just like the scary father in ‘Shine’.

Incidentally, it’s totally the right decision to ditch Beckham, 35, and most of that Golden Generation – but don’t ‘tell’ Beckham he has ‘no future’ before you actually get around to telling him in person.

As Steven Gerrard says, Beckham is a fighter and won’t take this lying down. England’s captain said: “I’m sure that if he hears that news, it’ll drive him on and he’ll try to prove people wrong and try to get back in the set-up because I know he loves playing for England.”

Do you think Beckham will ever play for England again (in a competitive match, not a friendly hurrah?)