What an achievement !
Fabio Capello taught England how to play football in 10 days.
It’s true that Zagreb was a 4-1 win against 10 men, but it was fantastic and surprising. The England team had bottle as well as muscle, organisation as well as flair.
Our teamwork was very good. We saw Rooney’s best game for four years and we saw Walcott, a teenager, scoring three goals. We saw stars playing for the team, rather than expecting the team to play for them.
Clearly, Fabio Capello is his own man. He is not a pleaser and that is fine with me because I was brought up on sergeant-majors. George Graham and Sir Alex are sergeant-majors. Brian Clough, a charismatic bully, was a sergeant-major, Scolari is a Brazilian sergeant-major, Mourinho an educated sergeant-major.
Five years of Sven-Goran Eriksson was five years with a pleaser. Nice guy, a charmer who knows how to please big stars, rich presidents, powerful companies. He copied Gerard Houllier’s defensive pattern at Liverpool, booted it up to Owen and Heskey, relied on matchwinners Owen, Gerrard, Beckham and Scholes. With Adam Crozier and Sven, it was all about kissing the arses of our superstars. It was all about David, about Wayne and Rio and Stevie and Frank. That era was all about sucking up to our richest and most famous footballers.
Those of us who have followed Fabio Capello’s career are not surprised because we know he is not a pleaser. In his first season at Real Madrid, after they won the league with games to spare in 1997, President Lorenzo Sans asked him to give his son, a defender, a game, since the results now didn’t matter. Capello told Sans that his son wasn’t good enough to play for Real Madrid and that he wanted to win the last few games to make a statement for next season. He left after a year.
In 2006, Real Madrid hired Capello again. On his first day back at the training ground he immediately went over to where some fat Brazilians were sitting around. He gave Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos an almighty bollocking and told them to shape up or else.
The president and the sporting director wanted to know what he was going to do, so he told them. He said he wanted a team with pace because he had seen them ripped apart by the pace of Barcelona and Arsenal, so he was looking to get rid of Beckham and Raul at the end of the season. He told the president that the back five and Diarra would always play, that Ruud Van Nistelrooy would always play, and the others would rotate. Again, he won the title. And they sacked him.
When the FA brought Capello to England, the Italian had five friendlies, then Andorra and Croatia, two qualifiers away from home. After five friendlies, he knew what he wanted to do, so he didn’t watch the DVDs of the Euro 2008 qualifying failures against Croatia, when McClaren and Venables were in charge.
Instead, having scouted Croatia in Euro 2008, he identified their weaknesses, realised that promising young coach Slaven Bilic has Plan A and Plan A and isn’t too inventive when his men go a goal down. So he ended the Andorra game with Joe Cole and Heskey on the pitch because he always planned to start them in Zagreb. England didn’t feed Walcott enough in the Andorra game, so he changed that.
He figured : My back four have pace, I don’t need two holding midfielders here, so I’ll have two strikers and two wide players, and try to get the wide guys playing in the last third, passing to the strikers and getting passes from the strikers. He decided to play aggressively with width because that creates more space for Rooney. The wide men stretch the defence and allow small areas to be exploited. Rooney had space and players running for him, as he had at Man United last season.
In my previews, I was wrong about the game. I thought Capello would play for a draw, either by playing 4-5-1 or by using two holding midfielders. He could have paired Barry with Bullard. Instead, he played a high line in defence, compressed play, and when England lost the ball in midfield, had them hunt for it in packs in that shallow zone.
If he had defended deeper, Croatia would have been able play neatly round England because they have touch players with a change of pace. But when Capello decided to play to England’s strengths, and not worry about the opposition’s strengths, Croatia were surprised and knocked out of their rhythm. By squeezing the play, England were able to hustle them into mistakes.
Of course, one good run can always beat a high back four, but that only happened once, on the goal. Rio was covering JT, and Wes Brown should have been covering Rio. But Wes went AWOL. Luckily, in the event, that did not matter and we won handsomely.
So Capello has proved to the English public that he is tactically astute and has balls.
He saw where Croatia were vulnerable : at left back, where the No.6 Danijel Pranjic is good at coming forward but not at marking and covering.
Like his predecessors, his task is to make the most of what he’s got. He’s started to do that. He gambled that Croatia would not be able to outnumber England in midfield, and got away with that gamble because he seized the initiative with a fierce pressing game. He knew his back four were fast enough to play a high line and that Lampard was disciplined enough to help Barry to hold the middle.
Croatia started well and the first half was quite even, although the goal rocked them in 22 minutes.Pranjic panicked, kicked the ball against Novak, and it broke for Walcott to score and then England had 51% possession and led 1-0 at half time. After that, Croatia had to try to attack England with 10 men for the last 40 minutes of the game.
That was a great position to be in, given the game-plan that Capello had decided to execute. England kept a lot of width, that gave Rooney space, and he brought Jenas onto the left wing and his pass from that flank made Rooney’s goal. No team, even Spain or Argentina, could have back from the first goal and the red card, let alone come back from two more goals in four minutes.
Remarkably, Capello has taught England how to play without the ball and with the ball. He realised we lack the craft to beat to continental teams at their own game, so he liberated the natural belligerence of English football, while employing it within a functional framework.
That is a conceptual leap. That is what I have been waiting for since 1990. It looks obvious now, but a pleaser could never have done it. In only 10 days, he got England playing as a team. He has produced a businesslike England side that can score goals. With a ballsy game-plan, he beat Croatia 4-1 in Zagreb.
Obviously, the first goal was lucky, and the red card helped us a lot, but we saw what Capello can do in a competitive match. He has decades of experience. He knows that one performance isn’t a team, and that one performance by Theo Walcott doesn’t make him Jairzinho. The kid will never have that much space again.
After the disappointing 2-2 draw with the Czech Republic on August 20, the next 10-day international break looked like a big challenge for Capello, especially as England have often been rubbish in September.
Crucially, he liberated our belligerence. He trusted our belligerence. He gave shape and method to our belligerence.
He has Stuart Pearce on the bench with him, he gave the armband to John Terry because he is the most natural leader in the group, and he decided to go with Rooney, Heskey and Walcott, two bruisers and a choirboy. And the choirboy scored three goals. Luckily, David Beckham is willing to fly 8,000 miles to play five minutes for England and he is very supportive towards Walcott.
But the real story of the week wasn’t that we scored four goals and got three points. And it wasn’t that Walcott can do a lot of things that Beckham could never do.
The real story is that Fabio Capello is the right choice.
So far, he has been fearless. And if he is fearless, England can be fearless, and the Three Lions might just roar again. It’s early days, of course, but the signs are good. When we were all scared of Croatia, he wasn’t. He looked at what he had, and what the other guy had, and make his moves. And that’s what I take from this stunning victory in Zagreb : that Capello has proved to be a master of risk assessment.
Under Sven-Goran Eriksson and Steve McClaren we saw the EPL’s most famous millionaires say : I’m not playing for England, I’m playing for me !
That era is now over.