Sitting on a coach in Lesotho with Fabio Capello and a dozen English football
writers, I'm wondering: when did it happen? When exactly did the England
football coach become an entirely surreal figure? Was it when Steve McClaren started calling Steven Gerrard 'Stevie G'? Was it when Sven was
sharing a girlfriend with half of the FA and Nuts magazine delivered a water bed to Soho Square? Or when Glenn Hoddle revealed his karma and the evangelist Prime Minister intervened on Richard and Judy to have him fired? Was it 'Do I not like that'? You could, I decide, sitting there, take it back further, to when the post was 'England manager' and Don 'Readies' Revie announced he was quitting the only job he had ever craved to earn decent dosh in the Emirates...
In this reading of history, it all began to go weird the moment that Sir Alf Ramsey was fired in 1974. And for that event, the present incumbent must take some share of the blame. The final defeat of Ramsey's reign was sealed
by a scuff ed goal from Capello at Wembley, the first time that Italy had won in England. Such is the Machiavellian aura of Capello that you could begin to imagine that, even then, he was planning his application for what has become the world's most lucrative football job. Perhaps he guessed that the Football Association would spend the next 30-odd years of hurt atoning for the original sin of firing the 1966 World Cup-winning manager. Perhaps he knew that eventually, having looked to various media-friendly messiahs, they would eventually want to throw money at a man quite as curmudgeonly and tight-lipped as Ramsey.
As the bus swings around the tight corners of the south African mountain kingdom – a curious lunar landscape of parched grey earth, in which teams of local labourers half-heartedly hack at foundations for buildings in unlikely locations – Capello sits at the front of the bus, straightbacked, with his carefully tinted hair and his granite jaw and his own line of designer glasses.
His jacket is folded precisely on the seat beside him and he stares ahead, nodding occasionally at something that Ray Clemence – who won 61 caps
in goal but these days is England's youth-team co-ordinator – sitting next to him and gabbling in the exaggeratedly loud and slow English usually reserved for exotic waiters, has said.
The more I watch this scene, the odder it gets. There is no one in the world who looks more Italian than Capello, yet here he is, our man in Africa,
ambassador for English football as it attempts to spread love for the game (and along the way win some PR miles in its attempt to host the 2018 World
Cup and finally pay for the new Wembley).
If you begin to question any of this oddness, though, you tend to come up against the brick wall of a particular phrase. It is a phrase I had heard three times – once from Clemence, once from Capello's translator, a dour man with a David Seaman ponytail and a flat London accent, and once from Adrian Bevington, the FA's head of media relations – before we had even got on
the plane to fly out here. It is the phrase that is offered in answer to all the questions you want to ask of Capello's appointment to English football's
senior position, questions such as: 'Is it perhaps a slight problem, do you think, that the head coach can't communicate directly with the players or
the media?' or 'What is it about this job that actually justifies someone being paid £13,561 a day to do it?' That killer phrase is: 'Well, you can't argue with his CV.'
It is that phrase that has allowed Capello to do what he has done so far in the job – remain entirely inscrutable. It is also the phrase that proves conclusively that football is no longer a sport but a business, and that the belief at the FA is that, just as the Premier League can be bought by the team with the most cash, so the World Cup should go to the association with the
fattest wallet (why else would they give Capello eight times what his compatriot Marcello Lippi earned to win the last World Cup?).
In addition to Capello's CV – the eight championships in Italy and Spain with four different clubs – the other thing that the FA's millions have purchased is silence. All managers claim to want to do their talking on the pitch, but
with Capello the boast looks likely to be true. One of the purposes of this trip – as well as to view the FA's gesture towards development work in Africa
– is to let Capello get to know the press pack a little better and for them to see him in relaxed and open mode. This latter state, you can not help feeling,
may be barely discernible to the naked eye.
Capello played football, according to one contemporary observer, 'like a policeman directing the traffic'. As a man, he exudes much of the same sense. When he worked at Real Madrid – and won them an unlikely championship before being sacked – he praised General Franco for his 'legacy of order. In Spain everything works well, there is education, cleanliness, respect. We should,' he suggested to the Italian public back home, 'follow their example.'
Don Fabio's reputation has travelled. We get out of the bus at a school, where a coaching session is taking place. The former West Ham midfielder Geoff Pike, now a portly FA coach with a goatee, is passing on some of his knowledge to a group of local teachers and children as part of a Fifa initiative to raise standards in the game across Africa. The children gather to sing a
warm greeting to Pike, the prince of footballers from across the sea, and to Capello. While they sing, I have a chat with a couple of the Lesotho coaches. What do they know of Capello's style? 'Discipline,' they say. 'He is rigid, strong, disciplined.' 'What, though,' one wonders, 'is this Italian doing coaching England?' Well, I suggest, you can't argue with his CV.
When the session is over, Capello and the FA delegation go inside the school to be formally greeted by the Lesotho FA. There are a series of speeches, during which Capello occasionally consults his ponytailed translator to discover in what terms he is being flattered. 'Our King once turned to your Queen when he was in big trouble,' a development official recalls, of some historical skirmish. 'We now turn to you again, Mr Capello, for assistance.' Capello nods gravely.
The Minster for Sport quotes from the Nigerian Nobel laureate Chinua Achebe (who, in turn, was quoting Yeats), 'when the centre cannot hold, things fall apart', and intimates that without the FA's gift of 'footballs and shirts', things might well have fallen apart here, too. The principal secretary for the Department of Gender and Youth wonders at Lesotho's fortune in welcoming a 'man of the calibre of Mr Capello' to the mountain kingdom. There is then the traditional Ceremony of the Handing Over of the Umbro Kit. The Youth Minster hands each shirt, donated by the England sponsors, to Capello, who, in turn, hands it to the head of the Lesotho FA. He stops just short of blessing it. Behind Capello there is a notice on the wall. 'Codes of Conduct for a coach,' it says . '1. Punctuality 2. Preparedness 3. Cleanliness.' No doubt the great man would approve.
Although they are not usually a group that excites the most sympathy among the working population, the longer I spend with Capello, the more my heart goes out to football writers. Not only do they have to be eternally excited
by all the things that excite nine-year-old boys – whether Cristiano Ronaldo really is the best player in the world, whether Michael Owen is as quick as he was – they also have to display a Jesuitical genius for reading between the lines, for magicking back pages from game-of-two-halves cliches. Never has that skill been more necessary, I would guess, than in their dealings with the
new England coach.
Ever since the weirdness began, ever since Don Revie and Graham Taylor and Sven proved to be the best of all tabloid whipping boys, it has been taken as given that no public utterance that the England coach ever makes can pass without comprehensive analysis, to be stored up for character assassination and recrimination at a later date. In this respect Capello is the
football writer's worst nightmare. The press would have loved José Mourinho and his stylish bombast, they could have done something with the bluntness of Sam Allardyce, the blandness of Alan Curbishley even, but Capello is the ultimate headline- creating challenge.
He likes to give the impression of being a hard man of few words. Imagine the utterances of Mark Hughes, say, translated into Italian by a man with a ponytail, and then think of how you would fill two 'Sun-sational' pages with them overnight, and you begin to see some of the problem that the poor football writers face.
At the side of the pitch in Lesotho, after the international formalities are over, the collective wit of England's soccer intelligentsia is rehearsing some of these challenges once again. The writers are gathered around Capello, 4,000
miles from home, nagging at the vexed question of whether Wayne Rooney is or is not a 'natural' goalscorer. Does Rooney try too hard, or conversely,
not hard enough? Is it possible to teach Wayne to relax?
Capello, through the man with the ponytail, concedes in vague terms that yes, he has spoken to Rooney about his goalscoring. (There seems to me
to be no great surprise in this fact seeing as Rooney has been his only starting forward in his first two England matches – but it is nevertheless a nugget seized upon by the writers as possible headline gold.) And what did Capello say, they wonder, of the translator, when he spoke to Wayne? There is a pause while Capello recalls the essence of the conversation. Finally it comes. 'Goalscoring depends on how relaxed you are in front of goal. I believe you can help a player to be relaxed.' A scoop! Someone then wonders if Rooney would make a good captain of England. He might, Capello suggests, through the ponytail, but he is possibly too young for the time being. Now we are talking!
On the bus back to the hotel, Capello sits at the front in his red sweater, his jacket folded precisely beside him, occasionally smiling at something Clemence has said. In the seats behind him in conspiratorial tones, the writers are comparing notes, concocting tales. Did he say: 'Rooney is not a natural goalscorer'? Is the line 'Rooney has to relax'? By the time we reach
the hotel, it is clear that Capello believes that Rooney has a severe psychological problem, but that, nevertheless, he is about to become the
captain of his country.
That evening I have some time allotted with Capello for an interview, the first time a member of the British press has been given one-on-one access since his appointment. I have to say that I ascend to his penthouse suite, overlooking the shanty town of Maseru , with a sinking heart. He sits next to his interpreter, on a plumped-up sofa. I sit opposite, flanked by not one but two FA press representatives, alert for mantraps. When I arrive for this audience Capello, in his red sweater, with his jacket folded precisely on his hotel bed, is watching a speech by Silvio Berlusconi on some cable channel.
He must be gratified, I suggest, to see his old friend back in power? He smiles. Have they stayed close since Berlusconi employed him at Milan? He grins toward the TV. When did he last see the Italian premier? Ah, he says, fiddling with the remote. It was Berlusconi, I remember, who used to observe that Capello had only 'one small fault. It is that dialogue forms no part of his approach.' I have a sense it might be a long 45 minutes.
I am afraid I can report few revelations about the interior life of the England coach from the triangular conversation that ensues. We talk to begin with about this trip to Africa. He thinks it important that a man in his position should come to places like Lesotho and give something, anything, time and so on, back. Players have a responsibility in this area, too… No, he does not feel that football has been ruined by money, (though the salaries are, in the context of dollar-a-day nations like this one, somewhat absurd). 'Each of us has a responsibility...'
Moving on to his role with England, I discover that he has settled into it properly, now he knows what it is – it consists mainly of watching lots of
football matches. He thinks it is very important to learn English – he takes lessons every day he is in London – but it is slow progress and he is not,
for the foreseeable future, about to risk speaking in front of journalists who might twist things to their advantage. 'They kept telling me the Italian press was obsessive and then I went to Spain and it was a lot worse and now I am in England it is supposed to be worse still ,' the man with the ponytail explains.
While we talk, I'm developing in my head a pitch for a TV series. The perfect reality show, I've always felt, would involve a dozen football managers abandoned on a desert island. Sven, after his dalliances with the native girls, would be the first to have his glasses broken and his head on a pole, but after that who would you bet on to survive the longest? Arsène Wenger
crafting a new civilisation on Platonic principles? Mourinho talking Harry Redknapp and Steve Bruce into cooking his fish and building his hut and foraging for root vegetables? I've always assumed that Sir Alex Ferguson would eventually prevail, having gone native and unleashed sudden havoc with David Moyes from the jungle. But sitting opposite Capello, I have to concede it would be hard, in this scenario, to bet against him; there seems no complexity to him and yet at the same time an adamantine conviction; he
would dig in, play the long game and eventually impose order.
How long will it take the England team to reflect your character? I hear myself saying.
His translator cannot say. 'But I hope it will… because the teams I have managed that have come to achieve some results here and there have
always been a reflection of me, I think…'
I mention that the adjective that seems to attach itself to him is 'disciplined' and he nods curt assent. England's footballers aren't best known for their rigorous discipline, though, I suggest. What will he do about the Chinawhites
culture and the Wags?
He can't really say much because he has so far had the players with him for five days in total (at a cost to the FA, so far, I mentally tot up, of £2.5 m) but he hopes he will have to confront this problem of Wags because that will mean they will have qualified for the World Cup!
Will he allow them and their vodka Red Bulls anywhere near Johannesburg?
He thinks everything can be worked on and problems of this nature easily solved.
We continue in this manner. Along the way, Capello destroys a couple of the myths that have built up around him in the press, presumably from desperate hacks trying to invent insights (I know the feeling). One persistent piece of gossip is that he collects paintings and that he owns Chagalls: he says he wishes he did own all the paintings that have been ascribed to him in
the papers, but no he does not have a Chagall. He visits galleries, the National, the V & A, to think mainly, and he goes to Sotheby's, but he
does not bid.
Is it very odd sometimes to be an Italian ambassador for England?
'No. It's a good thing, and it's a challenge of course.'
Can he imagine an English manager in charge of Italy (Paul Jewell, say, masterminding the Azzurri)?
'I never rule anything out; that's my philosophy...'
In all of this, though quick to smile, Capello keeps himself as tight as an Italian back four defending a one-goal lead. Only a couple of times do the FA men have to step in with a saving tackle – once when I ask him how often he goes to Mass (' All the time...' he begins to say before the Hoddle Injunction is invoked and superstitious belief is deemed not an appropriate line of
inquiry) and once when I ask what book he has beside his bed ('A political one...' he begins, and after some discussion it is decided that its title is off-limits, too).
I hear, I say, that he calls his mother every day, has he called her from here?
Yes he has. 'I think it is the least I can do for an 88-year-old woman living on her own. As for me, I left home when I was 15, I had to achieve things on my own, so now I have to stay close...'
We talk a little about the importance of family. He has two sons, would he have liked them to have played football for a living?
He laughs, through the ponytail. 'My wife Laura said once when they were young, "You must go and watch Eduardo play." I went to see him and when I got back she asked , "How was he?" I said, "He must keep on with his studies."' Both of them, he says, could have played in the Italian second division, Serie B, but not Serie A – and where is the life in that? Now, one son is a lawyer and the other a financial adviser – so, he says, they can look after him in his old age.
Given the ongoing prosecution that alleges Capello's obstruction of the course of justice in prosecutions related to the match-fixing trial of his friend Luciano Moggi, and the parallel investigation by the Italian revenue authorities into £5 m of allegedly undeclared earnings – both matters in which he strenuously professes his innocence – you wonder whether he might be needing the services of his sons sooner than he thinks. But 'these are private matters', he
persistently insists, and leaves it there.
I wonder if he and his mother ever talk football? Does she have an opinion on Rooney relaxing in front of goal?
'Never,' he says. 'At home we never mention football. Not with my wife, not with my sons, not with my mother. Sometimes they will see something in the paper and ask me what I think. But I say,' he says, 'nothing.'
The next morning we are back on the bus. I have in my bag a copy of Arthur Hopcraft's classic book The Football Man. I have brought it along to compare and contrast the state of the game after England won their last World Cup to the state of it before they win their next one. (Ha.) Hopcraft has a section on Ramsey, written 40 years ago, which I reread: 'Ramsey is not a popular man, either with other professionals in the game or with journalists, in the superficial sense of affable familiarity... People who know him well
have lots of stories to illustrate his incommunicability, none of which have him telling jokes over large dollops of the hard stuff … Ramsey dresses
carefully, and in terms of haircut and collars and cuffs is impeccably groomed. He is plainly deeply conscious of his position in the responsible sense, not the pompous one… The team that won in 1966 reflected his character truly.'
This is the kind of dignity and pride that the FA no doubt hoped they would be forking out for in Capello. God knows, they had tried everything else. The impervious family man who would take no nonsense from self-styled galácticos. Look at the CV. Capello, in the course of his managerial career had tamed Totti and dumped Di Canio; he once threw Ruud Gullit off the team bus for insolence. His first edicts, like Ramsey's, were all about punctuality. His sartorial care is similarly obsessive. 'I can't stand ankle socks,' he has noted, in a manner of which Ramsey might well have approved. 'When a man crosses his legs and the trouser leg rides up to show hairy shins, it offends my eyes.'
That strategy is fine, as far as it goes, but, for Ramsey, the England manager's job did not vie with that of the Prime Minister for public attention, and he was not paid more than £1m per competitive game. Neither did he have to face the 24-hour scrutiny of the current media, the beast that must be fed. In some ways, watching – and participating in – this process in action
is like observing the irresistible force and the immovable object eye each other up. The football writers need stories; Capello is temperamentally
disinclined to provide them in any language.
Is that approach possible to sustain, with all that has gone before? That second morning in Lesotho seems to provide an answer.
We arrive early at a football tournament for children in Maseru linked with Aids education. Forty per cent of adults aged between 25 and 40 in Lesotho are HIV infected and of the kids taking part in the tournament it is suggested that up to 10 per cent may have the virus. The problem is that no one knows for sure, because there is still a stigma against testing. The purpose of this event, Kick 4 Life, is to bring the children here so that they can play football, learn about Aids, and be tested. If they are found to be positive, free antiretroviral drugs are available.
Beyond a general sense that he should be seen to care, it is not quite clear why Capello is here. The FA do not provide any input or money into this initiative; it is, rather, something that Ramsey, for example, would have had no need (or wish) to be a part of: a media opportunity. We watch, therefore, Capello watching a group of children in two rows pass a tennis ball behind
their backs in a game called 'find the ball'. The ball represents the HIV virus, and the person who is discovered to have it is routinely hugged by his or her classmates.
Nearby, the tournament is going on, and groups of skilful youngsters are playing barefoot in the sun. There is a row of tents at the back of the field and in these children are queueing to be tested for HIV/Aids. It is decided that Capello should observe one of these tests, and so the Mass-attending coach (who will not discuss his religion) sits in a tent sponsored by Trust studded condoms and watches as a 12-year-old boy takes an Aids test. The dozen English journalists watch, too, crowded in with cameras and microphones for a long and silent six minutes, waiting to capture perhaps the worst news of the boy's life and the England coach's reaction to it.
Later, Capello sits in the shade and conducts his post-test interview. It was, he is eventually coaxed into saying, among the most moving experiences of his life. But anyhow, through the interpreter: 'We scored a goal and it was a
positive result.'
It is at about this point when all comparisons with Ramsey seem to pale. Hopcraft concluded his profile of the World Cup-winning manager with the suggestion that control-freakery sometimes had its rewards. 'The exercise of a dominant will may be no light matter, but it has its depth of pleasure.' You fear a little that for all sorts of reasons that control, and that pleasure, will be denied Capello.
Later, a team of boys coached by him loses on penalties to one selected by Ray Clemence; it is generally hoped that it is not an omen.
The best CV in football?
Name Fabio Capello
Born 18 June 1946 , in Pieris, north-east Italy
Current salary £6.5 m per year
Honours summary As a coach, seven league titles in Italy and
Spain and one Champions League win; as a player, four league titles and one Italian Cup
Managerial history
2008- England
2006-07 Real Madrid – won La Liga in 2007
2004-06 Juventus – won Serie A in 2005 and 2006 (Juve stripped of these titles after match-fixing scandal)
1999-2004 Roma – won Serie A in 2001, the club's first scudetto for 18 years
1997-98 Milan
1996-97 Real Madrid – won La Liga during single season as manager
1991-96 Milan – won Serie A in fi rst full season of management, without a single defeat; won Serie A again in 1993, 1994 and 1996; won Champions League in 1994
Playing history
1976-79 Milan – won Serie A in 1979
1969-76 Juventus – won Serie A in 1972, 1973 and 1975
1972-76 Italy – won 32 caps; scored against England at Wembley in 1973
1967-69 Roma – won the Italian Cup in 1969
1964-67 SPAL, a small club in northern Italy - made professional debut aged 18
1960-64 Trainee at SPAL
Educational history
– English language tuition since 2007
– Graduate of Coverciano , the Italian FA's coaching centre in Florence
– Qualified as a chartered surveyor while a trainee at SPAL
– Learnt to swim after being hurled into the Adriatic sea by father when a child
References
Predrag Mijatovic, played under Capello at Real Madrid: 'A painful but necessary medicine.'
Franco Baldini, former assistant at Milan, now in England's backroom staff: 'Thinks about England as the mother of the game and the teacher of football.'
Ruud Gullit, one of Capello's invincibili at Milan in 1991-92: 'He is moody, but he knows what he wants. You have to go his way or you will get in trouble.'
Gianluigi Buffon, played under Capello at Juventus: 'A dictator. His way was the way to go.'
Robinho, played under Capello at Real Madrid: 'If his team is winning 1-0, he has absolutely no problem in replacing a striker with a defensive midfielder to guarantee the result.
Do I like it? No. It's not the way we see football in Brazil. But that is his style and it usually ends up paying off.'
Roberto Carlos, played under Capello at Real Madrid: 'There will be no spectacle, it will be 1-0, 1-0, 1-0... But the team will be there, correctly set up and balanced on the pitch. And always winning.'