It’s been fast, hasn’t it?
England lost 2-1 to Croatia on Saturday, November 17.
The FA board appeared at a press conference on the 22nd and announced that Steve McClaren had been sacked. They said McClaren was the board’s choice, not Barwick’s.
1-0 to Barwick, the master bureaucrat. The clueless manager was not my choice, folks, I’m not to blame.
Barwick then promised that the FA would take their time in hiring the next England incumbent.
After all, England do not have a qualifying game till September 2008.
The full 12-man FA board would meet on December 19.
But suddenly, on Wednesday December 12. Fabio Capello met Barwick and Trevor Brooking at Wembley.
His advisors are tweaking the contract and agreeing the remuneration for his all-Italian backroom staff. The radio says the FA Board have agreed by phone to endorse the hiring of Capello for the next two years, with a two-year option.
It’s very fast.
It’s 21 days ! It’s only 21 days since Steve McClaren was sacked !
Why is it so fast? Because Sky Sports News demand a new messiah? Because we live in a satellite world of rolling news? Because organisations have to feed the hungry maw of an insatiable 24/7 news machine?
It’s because Terry Burns recommended that the FA hire a new chairman, who would sack Barwick and hire a new chief executive, who would then would hire a new England coach.
By moving faster than Kaka in an AC Milan counter-attack, Brian Barwick has secured his job for two more years.
His pre-emptive strike has allowed the recent past to be airbrushed away. Steve Whatwashisname is now ancient history – but the incompetent board who hired him is still in place !
A board with any balls would have replaced Barwick and given Brooking the money to improve English footballers, who are a seriously endangered species. We need a National Training Academy, where we can teach better coaches, and we need to revolutionise grassroots football, and set standards that future English footballers can aspire to. We need new ideas for coaching the eight and ten years olds, so that we have hundreds of two-footed players coming through into the professional ranks.
Clearly, the chief exec has outsmarted his board. History will surely record that Brian Barwick moved very fast to look after Brian Barwick. Moving swifter than a Stevie G thunderbolt into the bottom corner, the TV executive has hired one of the world’s top coaches.
So Fabio Capello becomes Barwick’s man, his appointment, his standard bearer, the colonel of his part-time regiment. If England are winning games, nobody cares who the chief executive is.
If the FA hired a new chairman now, he would be powerless. A new chairman can’t hire a new chief executive now. Lord Burns must be appalled by the way this has been done, although he would never say so.
And if England qualify for the 2010 World Cup, Barwick is a success. And we will definitely qualify by winning a Ukraine-Croatia-Belarus-Kazakhstan -Andorra group.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited about the appointment and I can’t wait for Switzerland at Wembley on February 6 and Paris on March 26. As sure as God made little green apples, Fabio Capello will improve the England team.
But he won’t improve the FA.
In Friday’s Guardian, Paul Kelso’s piece – Board disquiet stalls Capello’s coronation – included this par :
However, there was significant disquiet expressed during the two conference calls with the board, with the all-Italian make-up of Capello’s backroom staff and the exact role of Franco Baldini, his proposed right-hand man, exercising some members. Capello is expected to appoint three key coaching staff in Franco Tancredi (the goalkeeping coach), the assistant Italo Galbiati and the fitness trainer Massimo Neri alongside Baldini, who was his sporting director at Real Madrid.