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.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in