James Lawton: England are the laughing stock again
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Fabio Capello resigns
An FA statement read: "The Football Association can confirm that Fabio Capello has today resigned as England manager."The statement went on: "This follows a meeting involving FA chairman David Bernstein, FA general secretary Alex Horne and Fabio Capello at Wembley Stadium."
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Fabio Capello wouldn't bend and if such a capacity is what you want in the leader of the England team there is a time and a place when it is best expressed.
This was neither the time nor the place, which means that what we have in place of unshakable principle is something that is hard not to see as betrayal.
The issue, the £6m man refused to see, wasn't about his right to make a certain selection or preserve a particular captain, however weighed down by the accumulated baggage of two increasingly desperate years.
It was to accept the belief -- clearly expressed by his employers -- that some matters move far beyond the touchlines of any football pitch. They concern how you deal with a situation carrying, maybe, more significance than one football match or a decent showing in a major tournament.
The issue isn't John Terry's innocence or guilt in the charge that he racially abused Anton Ferdinand. It is whether it is in the best interests of everyone concerned that he remains captain under the shadow of the court case, which will not be decided until after this summer's European Championship finals.
Capello returned yesterday -- after an interview on Italian television that seemed to represent something close to calculated insubordination -- in open defiance of such a proposition. Terry as his captain, he made clear, was the only foundation on which he would conclude a regime which seemed to have reached rock bottom at the World Cup in South Africa.
It was brinkmanship which, short of some appalling climb down by the Football Association board which decided that Terry's situation made him untenable as captain, could end only in one way. The result is of course one chaotic and divisive situation heaped upon another.
The result is that the English football is made, once again, a laughing stock. However, on this occasion the FA presents an easy target only to those who failed to recognise that as it came to its decision about Terry's captaincy it faced an extraordinarily difficult dilemma.
Capello's new-found enthusiasm for Terry must surely come as something of a surprise in view of the fact that so recently the Italian took just a matter of minutes to dismiss him in the wake of the controversy over his alleged affair with the former partner of ex-Chelsea team-mate Wayne Bridge.
Then the case, in Capello's eyes as well as those of most of the football community, seemed open and shut. Terry had caused a huge split in the England camp. Now it seems that Terry is integral to England's hopes of making any kind of success of the Euros.
This is despite the fact that the extent of the division in the England squad seems close to identical with the one created by the original affair. Capello's decision to walk last night makes the whole adventure of his appointment a sorry story of missed opportunity and colliding professional values.
Capello wanted to create his own closed world of discipline and control -- and then he found a world where players had become used to following many of their own instincts.
The first breaking point came in the team's isolated training centre in the South African veld. The second came when members of the England team, and not least the influential Rio Ferdinand, made clear their unhappiness with the Terry situation.
Last night it happened, the end of the project. The silencing of any serious hope that Capello might salvage something from the wreckage of his work in England.
If there was sadness, there must also be anger. This was a trial of strength that went wrong, not a serious effort to mend wounds and rescue a difficult, if not impossible, situation. (© Independent News Service)
- James Lawton
Irish Independent
