Amid all the fake blood and thunder, car-crashing, bashing and diving that has scarred the games we love in recent days, it is time for those few of us still deluded enough to believe that sport represents the very best that life can offer to reflect on a very happy man. Well, you assume he’s happy, though it’s hard to tell. His reassuring, be-scarfed, bespectacled and unmistakeably Italian visage has already graced several Premier League grounds this season, sitting self-contained in his own sea of tranquillity and confidence. Life is currently fab for Fab, and why not? Who can’t love Fabio Capello? He’s got what for years has seemed the most difficult job in football, England team manager, and turned it into what looks like the easiest.
And maybe it is the easiest. After all, you don’t have to worry about transfers, Man City coming in for your players, wage negotiations or fixture congestion at the end of May. All you have to do is get the lads together, confiscate the mobile phones, kick out the hangers-on, eat meals together, tell Gerrard what to do, then leave them to get on with it.
There was a time when England qualifiers came ready-mixed with a large helping of dread, the sharpening of knives for a wally with a brolly or some other doomed and anxiety-wracked gaffer, followed by some back-page comparisons to well-known English vegetables. Not now though, and not ever you suspect with Capello. Seven wins from seven matches in the current World Cup qualifying campaign, and now, less than two years after Steve McClaren made himself look a silly sausage in the rain against Croatia, the nation is heading into the imposing tie against that same foe next week in rather better spirits, our side keeping the rarefied company of the Dutch and Spanish, the only other countries not to have dropped so much as a single point. And who would bet against Capello’s England winning all 10 of their games? Not me.
So how does he do it? First, of course, the glasses. Compare Capello’s businesslike 1960s Marxist lecturer’s thick black rims to the milquetoast rimless ones worn by Sven, perfectly heralding the pallid football produced by the Swede’s teams. Sven was sold as the brainy Scandinavian offering football with erudition, but he turned out to be just an amiable old lech. Capello is the real thing: look no further than those specs. Second, he’s got the best footballing CV in the world, winning domestic league titles with all the teams he’s managed — Milan, Real Madrid, Roma and Juventus, as well as countless club and international honours as a player. Third, he’s adopted the astoundingly complex method of deciding who the best players are and playing them (doesn’t Defoe look terrific?), and not playing the ones who won’t cut it. McClaren, Sven and their predecessors would likely still be picking Michael Owen for these next two games, including Saturday’s friendly against Slovenia, while Capello knows he’s not good enough.
Finally, of course, there’s a lot more to Capello than football. He’s a passionate lover of modern art since his playing days with Juventus, and has a gazillion-pound collection, featuring among others Kandinsky and Chagall; he loves opera (or so they say, I was at Glyndebourne on Sunday and didn’t see him); and is enormously well-travelled, from Mexico to the Himalayas. He also has, it seems, agreeably robust political views. Oh happy man indeed.
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