I know it's just that I preferred him playing centrally. As for Capello, according to SSN he held talks with the F.A. at Wembley.
Just come through on the radio now, it sounds like Capello finished his talks with the FA not so long ago, and has since left the country to go and watch the world club championship. Sounds like we got him. It was reported that the opinion is most of the details of the contract was done before today, and todays face to face hammered out the final few points. Thats all they said on the report off BBC Five just now.
I hope that is the case and that it hasn't all gone pear shaped....in other words, everybody sat face to face and Capello realized he didn't want all this pressure or he gave a bad impression to the FA suits.
I told my Dad as soon as McClown was sacked that Capello would be the next England manager. Now my Dad is moaning at me because he didn't put a bet on it. Silly man. He wanted the job after KK quit, so this to me was almost certain after he expressed his interest. We wasted our time on Maureen, really.
Maureen would have been nice, but his teams don't play fluid attacking football. Now I'm aware that Capello's teams are conservative as well, but he is more proven than Maureen. The guy has won everywhere he has been. If we don't succeed with Don Fabio, we are officially shit as far as I'm concerned. Give him a contract until after the next world cup, and we're sorted. My personal choice would have been Scolari though.
Oh, and just bringing in one foreigner isn't enough for the long term. What we need is to employ the best coaches around the world to train our youngsters up. Hopefully that meeting with Maureen will have at least given the FA some ideas for the long term.
Good job if they got him. The man is a proven winner at the highest level. For all his faults Sven was not a major failure with 3 qualifying group wins and 3 quarter finals, and Capello is a class above him as a coach. Plenty of time before the qualifiers for him to settle in to the country, brush up on his English and watch the fringe players he may not know much about.
Good luck with Capello ... and be prepared for (boring) security football (that's what Juve & Real played under him). At least he knows how to win domestic titles. You can't imagine how happy I was when he finally left Juventus (despite his 2 Scudetti)...
As an england fan I don't care how boring our football is right now...as long as we start getting results
People have said one bad thing about Capello is his unwillingness to change. I see this as a strength. We changed far too much under Sven and McClown, so I hope Capello gets his system, and his ideal starting line up, and sticks with it, even if it seems not to be working at first. He has 9 months or so to prepare for the qualifiers, so his team and system should be pretty much set in by the time we play our first game.
Sven was OK. A good organizer, and his team was hard to break down, problem was, he wasn't great tactically, and the amount of caps he gave the likes of P Nev and Heskey was pure insanity. We needed great from Sven, and we got "acceptable".
I agree, in fact i'm getting pretty excited at the prospect of having Coppelo as manager of our great team.
Give it a fkvking rest, will yer pal. You passed boring and idiotic, (actually entering a whole new category there isn't currently a name for), some time ago. Anyway, it looks like we're presented with a choice between the crook and the fascist. Ain't much of a choice, is it.
As a Madrid supporter, I'll take Capello's style over a trophy-less season anyday. I've seen more boring forms of football, it is not by any means catenaccio. Capello will not sit on his hands and let his teams defend a 1-0 result. If you want examples of a Capello team playing entertaining football look at Madrid's win over Bayern at home in the CL, or either game against Barcelona. It is not Sexy Football, but trust me I think England fans will appreciate hard, dedicated, and organized football that garners results. There might be some growing pains, there were hard times in Madrid when Capello came but it never got out of control and Madrid were never further than 6-7 points off the leaders at any given point in the season. The other thing Capello brings to the table are his substitutions. Capello deserves a lot of credit in Madrid's 31/36 point total to close the season. In countless games, Capello moved to put in Guti or take him off. He knew when Beckham should come off in the final game and replaced him with Jose Antonio Reyes who bagged the equaliser and the clincher in 20 minutes of play. He also is not afraid to bring in the young guns, he brought in Miguel Torres from the youth team and that move paid off big time. His man-management skills are second to none. Robinho has improved immensely as a player thanks to the discipline Capello instilled in him. The reason why Robinho is finally meeting expectation in Madrid now is because he hustles back to defend and knows when to cut the fancy footwork and just run at a defender or pass to a teammate. The fact is that Capello's lack of aesthetic style doesn't matter. World Cup winning teams play pragmatic football. The fancy stuff does not cut it when you face a world power in the quarterfinals and beyond. You got to know how to outhink and outlast your opponent and Capello knows exactly how to do that. If the players buy into his system, then he will be very successful.
Well said Andy, it's time to move on and look at the future and more importantly what he can do for our great nation.
Stars sweat as Capello prepares to take charge of England Beckham and Ronaldo at Real Madrid, Alessandro del Piero at Juventus, Edgar Davids at Milan and Francesco Totti at AS Roma: you could put together a formidable team of players that have found themselves sitting on the bench after lighting Capello's notoriously short fuse. Amongst England's current crop of allegedy world class performers, Frank Lampard would appear to be the most vulnerable to the Capello chop. High-tempo pressing has also been a recurring theme in Capello's tactics, so it would appear highly unlikely that he will persist with the dysfunctional Lampard-Steven Gerrard partnership that England have been struggling with for the last five years. There are also rumours that Capello is no great fan of the current England captain, John Terry, while a player like Shaun Wright-Phillips, championed for his pace under the old regime, may find himself a victim of the new manager's insistence that the ability to retain possession is the primary qualification for international football. more...
Interesting piece. I wonder if he might bring in a defensive shield along the lines I mentioned... someone like Ledley King? I say that because it mentioned him playing DeSailly as a defensive midfielder at Milan.
You guys are going to play like sh!te... but you are going to win games. Both things are almost guaranteed.
We've been playing like shit for the best part of 7 years, Euro 2004 excluded, why should that bother us now?
I fancy myself a better manager than Gingerballs McLaren- but that's not saying much. I think every World Cup winner at least in my lifetime has had pragmatic streak to it. Italy is pretty self explanatory. Brazil in 2002 scored a boatload of goals (thanks to that vanilla group, which might be the easiest of all time China, Costa Rica, and Turkey) but come the knockout rounds they knew it was time to hunker down, a lot of people don't realize that Brazil was heavily dependent on Gilberto Silva and Edmilson in Midfield to do the dirty work. France under Aime Jacquet was labelled Paleolithic by the French Media, yet they won, unlike the more Stylish 80s team headed by Tingana and Platini. Brazil in '94 gave up the flash and glam that they played with during the Zico Era and oops they won. 1990- Germans. 1986- A solid squad built on the remnants of the 1978 squad inspired by Maradona. 1982- Italians. 1978- Daniel Passerella's hardman behavior and play personified the team as a whole. 1974- Pragmatic Germans beat Pretty Dutch. 1970- The exception?