Don’t be fooled: Capello still stifling England’s future

Fabio Capello tonight announced his England squad to face France at Wembley on Wednesday, and it looks very much like the only bold, positive changes have been made out of desperation rather than a serious desire to rejuvenate the national side.

Since the World Cup debacle Capello seems very much to have taken a short-term view, looking only at the remaining two years on his contract. His desire to persist with the old guard who have failed time after time was made clear last month against Montenegro, when he openly displayed the fact that he’s not serious about Jack Wilshere as an option at full international level. In that turgid game, where England were crying out for some creativity, Capello left Wilshere, who has been displaying exactly that kind of creativity prominently for Arsenal this season, on the bench. I have no doubts now that Wilshere’s presence in recent squads has been nothing more than a token gesture to placate those calling for new blood in the team. Unfortunately, today’s squad just takes that further.

If Jermain Defoe, Wayne Rooney and Frank Lampard were all fit, you can be sure that Andy Carroll, Jay Bothroyd and Jordan Henderson would not have been called up for this game. All three of them absolutely deserve their places in the squad (although Bothroyd does represent a gamble, considering his excellent form has come in the Championship), and the reason why I believe that is that Wolves’ Matt Jarvis was excluded. On current form, few Premier League players are outperforming left winger Jarvis, who did well again today under the eyes of the England manager, but Gareth Barry is fit and so he makes the squad in his stead, despite having been very poor in his last few internationals and quiet in a slumping Manchester City side.

Another who should without a doubt be in the squad is Bolton’s Gary Cahill, who made his long-deserved debut against Bulgaria, but he’s not there either. What exactly is Capello going to learn from playing Terry and Ferdinand at centre-half on Wednesday? Even if you overlook the fact that the former is not good enough and the latter is approaching Ledley King levels of fragility, the two have 143 caps between them. All they will be doing is denying Cahill and Phil Jagielka valuable experience of international opposition.

In an ideal world, Cahill, Jagielka, Jarvis, Henderson, Carroll, Wilshere and Kieran Gibbs would all start against Laurent Blanc’s there-to-be-taken-advantage-of Bleus. But let’s face it, it’ll be Terry, Ferdinand, an out-of-form James Milner, Barry, Peter Crouch, Steven Gerrard and Ashley Cole in their places. I don’t see how Capello benefits from any of them picking up another cap, with the exception of Milner who should be taking Barry’s place in the middle for Jarvis’ sake, but will inevitably be stranded on the left. Milner these days is an industrious player rather than a creative force, and should be employed in the centre where he was so brilliant for Aston Villa last season.

So sadly, on the face of it, there’s a lot to be optimistic about in this England squad, but under the surface it has “squandered opportunity” written all over it.

Capello’s half-hearted revamp betrays confusion in England setup

Forty-four days since their humbling exit from the World Cup, England begin their preparations for Euro 2012 qualifying tomorrow with a friendly against Hungary hoping for a bright new start, but as Fabio Capello admits he doesn’t know what to do to get the members of that ill-fated jaunt to South Africa to perform for him, there are worrying signs that this is not going to be the complete overhaul of the squad that is required.

Apart from the huge amounts of money they would have had to spend to sack him, the FA must have insisted to Capello that a condition of his retention as England manager would be to drop the ageing players who have let the national team down for many years and bring in a new generation of young players to mould together in anticipation of Poland and Ukraine in two years’ time and ultimately Brazil in four. That, however, does not seem to have really happened. Although pint-sized Arsenal prodigy Jack Wilshere has been fast-tracked into the squad alongside his club team-mate Kieran Gibbs, the bulk of the squad is still made up of the same old players, and the expected starting eleven for tomorrow’s game makes for depressing reading.

The luckiest man to still have a place is John Terry. Never a truly world-class defender, Terry’s brave attitude has complemented well the likes of Ricardo Carvalho and William Gallas at Chelsea over the years, but he is now cripplingly short of pace, a huge deficiency for an international centre-back, and after his rather pathetic attempted mutiny at the World Cup it is very surprising that a man of Capello’s supposed ruthlessness has stuck with him. In two years’ time Terry will be 31. If you think he’s slow now, just imagine how much of a liability he’ll be then. It’s not as if he’s even been one of the most outstanding English centre-backs at club level over the past two seasons or so. Having fully earned their call-ups to the squad, Everton’s Phil Jagielka and Tottenham’s Michael Dawson should be the two to start in that position for the opening qualifier against Bulgaria.

It’s not just Terry who should have been jettisoned, too. While they still have the ability to contribute towards the 2012 campaign, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Gareth Barry all need a wake-up call. They should have been told to go back to their clubs and put in performances to win back their places and prove that they should be trusted again. It’s not as if this is the first opportunity that these players have had to bounce back from a poor summer tournament. A new, harsher approach is required to seriously tackle the complacency that has become rampant in the minds of these players, who have long since succumbed to believing their own hype.

In keeping faith with them for this first new squad, Capello has betrayed his lack of confidence in the younger generation who have been knocking on the door. If he really thought that they were good enough to be brought through into the first team then he should have followed the example of Laurent Blanc. The new France coach, surfing an Obama-like wave of optimism from the fans for simply not being his predecessor, took the clever step of ‘suspending’ every member of his country’s World Cup squad for their friendly against Norway, calling up thirteen uncapped players and all but one under thirty years old. They have been given the initiative in the build-up for their qualification campaign and the disappointments from South Africa have to do the work of winning back their places if they are worth it. That Gerrard, Lampard, Barry and Terry are all set to start against Hungary shows that in reality the call-ups of Wilshere, Gibbs, and the like are little more than a token effort to appease those calling for a more radical overhaul.

There are also questions being asked of Capello’s man-management. This is most apparent in the case of Robert Green. Dropped from the original squad while Terry et al remained, the West Ham keeper was overlooked when first Paul Robinson petulantly retired from international duty because he didn’t want to be a backup, and then when Ben Foster had to pull out through injury. Scott Loach’s emergency promotion from the Under-21 side makes sense, as he is first choice there and at Watford in the Championship, and although he is far from the finished article, he can reasonably be expected to push for a regular place in the squad in a couple of years’ time. That he has been joined by 22-year-old Frankie Fielding, Blackburn’s fourth choice whose last competitive game was against Barnet on loan with Rochdale in League 2, is a pretty severe kick in the teeth for Green. That Green has been so obviously scapegoated for one mistake that arguably was less embarrassing than John Terry’s positioning against Germany and such like seems more than a little off on Capello’s part, as if he thinks that the rest of the squad have chosen to blame Green rather than seriously face up to their own deficiencies, and that he is desperately trying to indulge that childish belief to try and get them to perform by any means. Fielding may have promise but nobody can pretend that he is anywhere near Green’s level. This inconsistency in punishment for the South African failure reflects very badly on Capello in my view.

There are plenty of players in the squad who deserve to be there, forming the core of the upcoming qualifying campaign. Jagielka, Dawson, Joe Hart, Gary Cahill, James Milner, Ashley Young, Adam Johnson, and Bobby Zamora have all earned the right to be where they now are. But there are still glaring omissions (Jack Rodwell and Lee Cattermole are two who stand out) and those who have been called up may feel undermined by not being given the chance to start at Wembley tomorrow. This is not the bright new dawn that England fans have been hoping for, and it seems increasingly clear that Capello may not be capable of ushering it in after all.