Fab Timing

A clash of two calamitous titans has ended in a break-up. Capello and England. Gaffer and Governer. A love that didn't last.

In truth, this is one of those occasions on which you can see the case from both points of view, as well as accepting the parting of company as inevitable. On the one hand, John Terry's position had become untenable thanks to the ongoing race row between him and Anton Ferdinand. The FA could not allow their national team's primary representative to be somebody who is (allegedly) embroiled in a racism spat.

However, Fabio Capello is the manager, and the man with the reputation. He was the man entrusted to lead the England team to glory, and as a result he should have full control of team duties. When the FA intervened it was an undermining of his position, and Capello clearly felt that he couldn't work under such circumstances. Capello could not allow his position to be belittled in a way that affected a team policy he truly believed him.

It's a sticky one, with no easy answer.

However, as I mentioned in the ominous previous article 'A Growing F.A.rce', this whole mess could have been handled far better by the FA. A major team decision was seemingly executed without Capello being consulted at all. Regardless of how both parties felt about John Terry's captaincy, surely it would have been more desirable and productive for the FA to have held a meeting with Capello prior to any formal announcement regarding Terry. This way, both parties would have maybe been able to find a compromise, and neither would have felt undermined by the other.

I'm not saying Capello would have necessarily stayed if he'd at least been notified of the impending decision, but I can't imagine that a decision being taken without his knowledge particularly aided the situation. It just goes to typify how the FA are hopelessly clumsy when it comes to team and managerial affairs.

But let's look at the flipside of this great implosion. As opposed to what would have been a dreary tournament under an unwanted Capello regime, England now have the chance to do something different and interesting with Euro 2012. If the next permanent national manager is appointed in time for the Championships, they will get an immediate and very useful illustration of the state of the England team in major tournaments. The side needs fixing and, without wanting to sound agonisingly pessimistic, what better way to get started than by a demonstration of where the team is broken, with every crack and fracture under the microscopically stringent examination of a major tournament?

It's an opportunity alright, but the constant stone in my stomach regards the people who will be making the managerial choice, given their track record. The pressure is on for them to pick Harry Redknapp, and I think this pick would have both strengths and weaknesses. Harry is undoubtedly the most suitable man for the job when considering the team's immediate future, but beyond that it becomes a fuzzier picture. After all, Redknapp is 64, and that's an age most managers will struggle to reach whilst still in the prime of their careers. That said, if Redknapp can have a positive influence on building the team, and maybe hang around for three or four tournaments, then he could make a massive difference in England's future.

There's no guarantee that it will be Redknapp though, despite the enormous support he is receiving. The FA like to keep a clean image, and tend to steer clear of any troubled figures when it comes to the managerial position (though clearly not when it comes to the actual team). They famously turned their heads away from Brian Clough, despite him undeniably being highly competent and the most capable hands with which the job could fall into. Redknapp was only today cleared of tax evasion, but the lingering air of dodginess hangs around him like a crazy love-fuelled dog. The FA might want to go for a 'safer' option.

The only issue with that is, there are no candidates who tick both the 'clean track record' and 'capable' boxes. If the FA really does go for a 'safer' option, then they will have once again shown their own ability in running the national team (that was meant in a bad way... just so you sort of got the tone of that sentence). However, I'm not going to castrate them for something they haven't done yet.

What I will say is if that stupid excuse goes through their gawking skulls, perhaps it may be worth giving Stuart Pearce a run-out for Euro 2012 (and by that I mean as a manager, not a player). After all, Pearce is almost guaranteed the England hot-seat at some point in the future. Why not allow him a little lick of the big tournaments now, whilst we've got this chance to do so? The worst that can happen is that he does badly, which in the greater scheme of things isn't that tragic. If he does well on the other hand, we then have a young and talented manager that can see England into the distant future.

Well, these are all ideas anyway. What really does happen will depend on the very minds that brought you Steve McClaren, so let's not get carried away just yet. Although this whole debacle has come out of race rows, mismanagement and just general shoddiness, the little rays of light are beginning to shine through again. Here's to a hopeful future for England.

A Growing F.A.rce

How does a stuttering shambles turn into a complete circus act? Just consult the England National football team, which has gone from being a rusted piece of heavy machinery to a complete trainwreck. The past week has not only re-emphasised a consistently failing organisation, but cast a new light upon the utter ridiculousness embodied in this turgid mess.

It was following much pressure that John Terry was alleviated from his captain duties last week. Whether or not you agree with this decision is beside the point though; what followed is a striking example of the miscommunication and chaotic management the England team suffers from. Fuzzy puppet Fabio Capello admitted he wasn’t consulted on Terry’s dismissal, nor did he agree with the decision. The FA today bit back by saying that with his words, Capello had committed an act that was in conflict with a contractual agreement. Even the coalition government radiates solidarity more effectively than this.

It’s difficult to understand why, given how drawn out the John Terry incident has become, the FA were not able to consult Capello on this matter before making a decision. Even if Capello had disagreed with the actions, this would have given both sides a chance to explain their position before showing a united front in the public. Instead, we now have the England manager saying that there are team decisions being made with which he is not entirely happy. How a governing body can allow this to happen truly boggles the mind.

The FA have illustrated for a long time that their ability to control the national football team is poor. Of course, the most visceral judgement we’ll make regarding this is our performance in the major tournaments, and over a long period of time this is a fair way of analysing their performance, but of course some managers just don’t fit and sometimes tournaments just don’t go your way. It has to be said though, their managerial choices are rushed and appear to be a constant bow to public pressure, but this isn’t the main issue as to why the FA is failing.

The largest problem is the stunning lack of foresight the FA has when making any sort of decision regarding the manager or the direction of the football team in general. For example, they fell for Capello’s trick to swindle a contract extension out of them before the World Cup. All Capello had to do was drum up some rumours about the possibility he would move, and the FA would gleefully bend over backwards to keep him at the helm. I’m not saying he did do that. Of course, I wouldn’t be allowed to say that. But either way, that extension probably made it financially impossible for Capello to be sacked straight after the World Cup, putting him in a position where there was no pressure to perform (clearly).

But even that doesn’t quite illustrate how poor the FA’s planning is. To try and explain my point, I have to really talk about the last 10 years of England’s history. During that time, we’ve had three different managers. When cuddly Swedish man Sven Goran-Eriksson was in charge, he kept the first eleven pretty much the same throughout his reign, with minor changes when players either retired or new young starlets burst onto the scene. As a man manager and tactician Sven was probably about average, but his focus and consistency with team selections allowed the team to perform moderately well.

 It was during this time when England looked the most likely to win a tournament. After looking quite strong, we lost to Brazil at the World Cup 2002, who went on to win it. We then lost on the dreaded penalties to Portugal in Euro 2004, again after playing some decent football. In 2006 however, Sven’s preferred eleven was starting to look older and Sven himself had become embroiled in scandal. It was at this point the England team started to fall apart, and after a muted performance at the 2006 World Cup the team desperately needed a new direction. Sven was removed, and this was going to be a crucial appointment for the FA to make.

The FA went for bewildered ombrophobe Steve McClaren, who is unfortunately one of the most notorious disaster stories in English management history. It was a massive mistake to appoint somebody who had been a part of Sven’s management team, as this meant McClaren had taken a lot of influence from the Swede and maybe felt pressured to keep using the players that had been so integral in the previous years. As it was, McClaren employed the same ideas that had started to fail for Sven, and the deterioration of the England team this time was so dramatic, McClaren failed to even qualify for the European Championships.

This whole episode was more damaging than you might think. Not only had England embarrassingly failed to qualify for a major tournament, but the development of a team for the World Cup 2010 had been set back two years whilst McClaren fumblingly shuffled the old players around trying to find the best formula. What would have been more useful is if somebody younger, untouched by the old reign and with undeniable potential had taken the job, and had been told by the FA that they should use the Euro 2008 qualifiers as an opportunity to get a team playing well together. That way, England would have optimised their potential for the World Cup 2010, which to almost everyone, is the more important competition and should therefore be prioritised.

It may seem a bit rash, but there’s a lot to be said for team chemistry. You may think it’s a little ineffectual, but when you look at the major successes in international football, you usually find that those players have played in a similar eleven for a long time and have built up an understanding with each other. Just take Spain. That team has a core of players that know each other inside-out, and as a result Spain are one of the most flowing and competent teams on the planet.

England just never get the opportunity to make that fresh start though. We are far too preoccupied with the tournament at hand, that we never anticipate anything beyond it. Let’s be frank – we won’t win Euro 2012. We knew that from the moment our qualifying campaign started. So with this in mind, why didn’t we use this experience as an opportunity to plant the seeds of a new young side that would have to potential to challenge for future World Cups? Sure, we might not have qualified for Euro 2012, but so what? If it’s a team of youngsters learning the ropes the hard way, then we’d be all the better for it in the end.

So anyway, back to bashing the FA. Following the catastrophe that was Steve McClaren’s tenure, the FA decided they would give the national team a different approach and appointed Fabio Capello. This was a good idea, but they made the mistake of employing someone who was already 61, and therefore unlikely to see the team past a couple of tournaments. This also meant that Capello wanted to achieve results straight away, so once again we had a team of players who were hanging over from the last generation so we could achieve more comfortable victories in the qualifiers. The benefits weren’t felt though, as England once again whimpered out of the World Cup and the FA sheepishly tied up Capello’s contract for what would be two more wasted years.

Now we reach today, and what we see is an unmitigated disaster. Not only is the team struggling, but we now have the manager at odds with the FA. A precedent has now been set that the FA can make petty decisions regarding things such as captaincy. And finally, the most likely candidate for the England job once Capello has finished is facing a possible prison sentence. It’s a remarkable mess, and one I fear will only grow unless the FA mark out England’s intentions as a football team and make a decision that will pay dividends, perhaps not immediately, but over time.

Snap, Tackle, Stop

I love a crunching tackle. There’s something inherently satisfying upon the moment a player throws himself to the ground, reaches the ball and legally tumbles his opponent. It’s a moment of pure athleticism, competition and sport. A love-letter to the beauty of defending.

And yet we continue to discuss the viability of the ‘tackle’ in modern football. Following Vincent Kompany’s red card in the Manchester Derby a couple of weeks ago, commentators and pundits have been on high alert. Currently, whenever the usually delightful thud of a strong tackle is heard, they go off like car alarms shouting about how it should be a sending off. Even in cases when players win the ball, pundits will point to how dangerous the tackle ‘could have been’ with regards to different situations.

Make no mistake, there is such a thing as ‘serious foul play’. However, the scope for which this applies has seemingly widened thanks to just one poor refereeing decision. Kompany’s tackle, albeit two-footed, was not dangerous and should not have been a red card. However, the referee got it wrong, and we can forgive him that. What is worrying is the way people seem to believe that this one incident has changed the very constitution of football.

Everything is being compared to this one tackle, as if Chris Foy that day wrote a new law straight into the annals of football defining what ‘serious foul play’ is. It’s bizarre, flawed logic that has been picked up for reasons I don’t understand. Take for instance Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal at the World Cup in 2010. Are we to say that following on from that incident, any shot that lands just a few feet over the line is not a goal? Of course not. It’d be ridiculous for a commentator to say “Well, if Lampard’s shot wasn’t a goal, then how can that be?”

One of the good things about football referees is that their job is to interpret the law, not make it. It means that referees are not obliged to follow the lead of their peers constantly, and FIFA and the FA aren’t bang to rights on any decision refs might make. If you were to follow a system in which referees had to constantly revise their rule book as one official after another makes a slightly outlandish decision, the game just wouldn’t work, and Stuart Attwell would just become the most hated man in the world.

So it makes no sense to compare any tackle to Vincent Kompany’s. But what of tackling? Has it lost its place in the game? I’d like to think not. After all, the spate of ‘dangerous’ tackles in recent weeks haven’t really been a result of anything more than the odd moment of stupidity. Certainly Yakubu’s reckless challenge was worthy of a red, but I don’t think you can outlaw tackling on the basis of what Yakubu is capable of. Otherwise running would be banned too.

The fact is that in the past five or six seasons we’ve only seen a handful of serious injuries in the Premier League, most notably to Eduardo and Aaron Ramsey (and the latter was a result of bad fortune more than a bad tackle). Both of those incidents led to a long-winded media storm where everyone pondered the possibility of tackling being too dangerous for the sport. These eventually died down, but the little spates of worry we have about tackling seem to be getting much more common. It’s a worrying trend, and I don’t think it will be long before it gets discussed by FIFA.

It may be an extreme-case scenario that tackling might be banned, but any form of law change is certainly possible in times like these. There’s nothing preventing FIFA redefining the term ‘dangerous tackle’ to include a larger variety of incidents, thereby limiting the harm to players. I don’t believe that’s necessary. As long as we vilify any intentionally awful tackles, condemn any clumsy and dangerous ones and are realistic about plain strong tackling the amount of serious injuries will remain minimal.

Knocks are part of the game we love, and I think it’s only right that you have to be made of strong stuff to play football. It would be an absolute tragedy if the most physical and athletic aspect of defending was curbed by a media witchhunt. We’ve moved on from the tackles of yesteryear, where you would be lambasted for lacking commitment when not going in two-footed. For the better, that is in the past. But I don’t think we can, or should, go any further in our attempts to soften tackles in football.

Stop! We Want To Get Off!

Ahh, for a moment I thought we’d reached stability. Reassuringly, it’s today been revealed that Portsmouth’s parent company CSI has been declared insolvent and has gone into administration. Thank Christ, I thought we’d found someone who was fit to provide boring financial security.

The implications for this afternoon’s revelation are unclear. Whilst Portsmouth themselves are ‘not in administration’, the only funds we can be definite about are for the very non-specific ‘short-term’. That could be the next three days for all we know, so the situation could again be absolutely dire. This seems especially likely when you consider the very downbeat tone of the club's official statement.

On top of that, the FA may well be docking Portsmouth points, as their rules indicate that the insolvency of parent companies can lead to the penalties of the club. Already in a relegation fight, this would be a sturdy iron blow to an already depleted and somewhat deflated squad, and one that our money troubles will only exacerbate.

Supporters can only ask how this has happened again. Since their FA Cup triumph in 2008, Portsmouth have been passing through fiscal travesties relentlessly, and every ‘new horizon’ has proved to be further murky waters ready and willing to suck the club into the mire and drown it.

Sacha Gaydamak, Sulaiman Al-Fahim, Ali Al-Faraj and now Vladimir Antonov have all proven to be walking (yet sometimes invisible) disasters for the club. It beggars belief really. The FA’s ‘Fit and Proper Persons’ test seems to be a completely phantom process. If it had any sort of effectiveness, at least one of the above names would have been prevented from running the club.

It truly is a disgrace. Sorry, but I’m going to keep this point going. The FA has the balls to threaten clubs with the deduction of points if their owners or parent companies go into administration, and yet can’t be arsed when it comes to actually preventing these people from being involved in football in the first place. The consequences of that are now subject of a beautiful summation at Portsmouth.

Worst could come to worst here. With the club statement itself projecting a gloomy outlook on the future, a grim pessimism is possibly the wisest prediction. If Portsmouth Football Club - champions of England in 1949 and 1950, and winners of the FA Cup in 1939 and 2008 – go out of business, then the FA have tragically failed at maintaining an iconic part of the English football picture.

Being a Pompey fan has been a difficult experience over the past three seasons. It’s been a stream of terms that no football supporter likes to hear: ‘insolvency’, ‘administration’, ‘the end is nigh’, ‘Carl Dickinson’. Really, all I want is to get out of this tedious and potentially fatal roundabout, and it’s clear we need help with that from a governing body. We need someone to put us directly in the hands of someone who is interested in the team and wants to provide financial composure.

I hold out hope things will get better, as I always do, but Pompey fans have been punched into the ground so often that it’s no longer easy to conjure up the spirit that embodied our terrific fanbase. One possible subdued ray of light could come in the form of Balram Chainrai. Perhaps the only man in the last five years who offered any degree of steadiness in his time as owner, Balram will presumably be owed money by Portsmouth still, and may be able to assume control of the club. He was never particularly bothered by the club, but he did keep us alive and we have to give him credit for that.

Again though, it’s complicated and we can’t know for sure that he’ll come to our rescue again. All we can be certain of is that, once more, we need a miracle.