It would appear that despite being England manager for more than three-and-a-half years, Fabio Capello is still having trouble with the lingo.

England are destined to fail miserably once more next summer- James Calvert

Speaking after the 1-0 win over Wales at Wembley, the Italian described his team as having been “lucky” when I think the word he was actually searching for was ‘pathetic’.

Yes it was a win. But only by default.

England were outplayed for large parts of the match and the only reason Wales didn’t get the draw they deserved was because Robert Earnshaw, faced with an open goal, decided to do his best Andy Cole impression.

A few days earlier in the previous qualifier, it had looked for a while like Capello may have finally started to deliver: the team played with pace, passion and precision against Bulgaria.

But in just four days they were back to their lumbering, lethargic, lacklustre selves.

And that’s how it has been under Capello from the word go. One or two displays that give you hope followed by one or two that show your hope was misplaced. A never-ending series of false dawns.

England have all but qualified for Euro 2012 – they only need a point against Montenegro to be certain of topping the group and could easily lose and still finish top.

But what happens next summer when they turn up for those finals in pretty much the same state as when they turned up for last year’s World Cup?

I’ll tell you what. They scrape through the group stage and then get hammered when they come up against anything like a proper team. Imagine England had been playing Spain or Holland last Tuesday. It would have been a cricket score.

For a long time I thought the blame for England’s mediocrity lay with the players. And some of it certainly does. Like Paul Ince said last week, they no longer consider it a privilege to play for their country.

Back in his day, and that wasn’t too long ago let’s not forget, playing for your country was the ultimate honour. Who can forget the sight, for example, of Ince playing a World Cup qualifier with a heavily bandaged head after declining to be substituted. (At the time, Paul Gascoigne brilliantly said it was like playing alongside a pint of Guinness).

Yet while the players may no longer feel the same overwhelming desire to wear the Three Lions, and while that must affect performance, I am now of the belief that the main problem lies with Capello himself.

The vast majority of the players who started against Bulgaria started against Wales. Yet the difference in performance was like the difference between Titus Bramble and Franco Baresi.

Capello’s latest excuse for this Jekyll and Hyde routine is, as I’m sure you’ve heard, the fact that England were playing at home. Apparently he feels the weight of expectation from the Wembley crowd is such that the players are going out on to the pitch with their heads not right.

The truth is that the Wembley crowd does expect. It expects England to win games that they should. But is that expectation anything other than obvious?

We are talking about England versus Wales here. The team ranked fourth best in the world against the team ranked 117th. I don’t know about you but I would expect the team in fourth place to walk that particular contest.

And I would also expect the players to feel the same way. If they don’t, that says an awful lot about what the manager has done to their confidence. Isn’t one of his key roles that of ensuring the players have the mental strength to deal with the pressure and the self-confidence to believe they can beat anybody?

When he was first appointed I had high hopes for Capello. I thought his stern and disciplined management skills were just what England’s prima donnas needed to knock them into shape.

But it simply hasn’t worked. Instead of taking their cockiness and using it as a positive, he has shattered their self-belief.

Alongside this failure in the psychology department, Capello is increasingly showing moments of tactical ineptitude as well. The more support you give an in-form Wayne Rooney, the more space he has and the more damage he can do. Simple. So why play him as the only out-and-out striker in a home game against a team you comfortably beat 2-0 away?

And why play with three players who are effectively wingers – Stewart Downing, James Milner and Ashley Young. In fact, more to the point, why bother playing Downing at all? One moment of decent play in 180 minutes of football. I could probably have mustered that.

To cut a long story short, England are, under the current manager, destined to fail miserably once more next summer.

There will no doubt be plenty of excuses for this – the length of the season being a prime contender (the ‘playing at home pressure’ excuse won’t hold much water).

But the reality is they have a man in charge who does not have the faintest idea how to get the best out of his squad.

In a perfect world Capello would walk away now and give the FA the chance to appoint a manager who can give the team what it needs – a confidence boost, selection stability and a fighting chance in the tactical department.

Chances are the new man would fail to bring home the bacon too. But at least they would have tried to change things before it was too late.

It almost feels like England have given up on next summer. And surprisingly, that is actually harder to take than the usual misplaced and irrational pre-tournament optimism.

A sporting nightmare

Wednesday’s air crash that wiped out an entire Russian ice hockey team and many of the club’s officials was a tragedy of immense proportions for the world of sport.

Ice hockey may not be your cup of tea. It certainly isn’t mine, mostly because to my untrained eye it is often impossible to see who actually has the puck.

But you don’t have to love or even like the sport to understand the immensity of this catastrophe. Thirty-six young men in the prime of their lives killed in an instant. The Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team wiped out in a split-second.

Ice hockey, certainly in Russia and probably around the world, will take years to come to terms with this.

Of course, as a self-confessed football fan, I can’t help but draw comparisons to the Munich air disaster in 1958 which killed eight Manchester United players and three officials along with another 12 people.

Yet as horrific as that was, there were at least some survivors, including manager Sir Matt Busby and a small but solid nucleus of players to provide foundations on which the club could rebuild.

Lokomotiv, however, have been left with practically nothing.

This isn’t just a Russian tragedy – the team’s delegation consisted of men from 10 nations including Sweden, the US, Canada, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

There are fears now that ice hockey will never be able to recover in the town of Yaroslavl. But I sincerely hope that isn’t the case.

The best tribute for the 43 people who lost their lives on that flight would be for Lokomotiv Yaroslavl as a club to be reborn from the ashes of despair.

It will be hard and emotionally trying. But ultimately I can’t think of a more fitting way to honour the memory of those that died other than making sure the club lives on.

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com
Twitter: @maltablade