Hot seat: Fabio Capello has kept his England job despite the poor showing at the World Cup
Dear lord, where do I start? Well, with a humble and sincere apology to Franz Beckenbauer, I guess. Turned out the old Kaiser was absolutely right. England were indeed a kick-and-rush, stupid, tired, burnt-out, paltry waste of space. Achtung! We surrendered.
Leader of men: Managers like Sir Bobby Robson are better at motivating the English dressing room
Below par: Wayne Rooney, Emile Heskey, Ashley Cole and John Terry all disappointed in South Africa
Discipline: Aspects of Capello's management that had worked in qualification failed to galvanise the team in South Africa
I watched the Germany match in mounting horror. It was like seeing your family inexplicably open the doors to the home you grew up in and invite thieves in to steal everything you’ve ever owned.
The disallowed Frank Lampard goal was a shocker but the idea that it stopped us going on to a glorious victory is palpable nonsense.
Germany were all over us like a particularly bad dose of measles for 90 per cent of the game. They were younger, faster, hungrier, technically superior and just ... better. Miles, miles better.
I was stunned by how badly we played. It defied logic that a team containing so many obviously good footballers were so pathetically weak.
Forget all the excuse-mongers blaming it on the lack of mid-season breaks in the Premier League. Carlos Tevez didn’t get one and look how he has been charging around.
I still can’t really get my head around it. But one thing’s for sure. Other heads must roll and roll fast. I’d have John Terry straight out the door, for starters. Not just for the appalling way he questioned Fabio Capello’s managerial skills in public and arrogantly reassumed the mantle of captain despite Steven Gerrard being given the armband. But for the fact against Germany, he was exposed in quite glaring fashion for his primary job — defending.
We can blame Matthew Upson all we like — and he must be axed — but Terry was standing next to him and was equally hopeless.
Chelsea fans tell me he hasn’t been the same since the sex scandal blew up last season. That the aura of invincibility that surrounded JT has gone. He looked a yard slower than the Germans, simple as that.
Yes, he was good against a poor Slovenia side. But so were most of the England team and it turned out to mean absolutely zilch. Like saying someone does well against Charlton but then disintegrates against Barcelona.
As for Robert ‘the ball made me chuck it in the net’ Green, he needs to be put out of his own misery, fast. And David James will be too old for the next big tournament and should give way to Joe Hart.
Emile Heskey's England career is finished, too. I felt sorry for him, he should never have been taken to the World Cup. It was a very undignified end to a thoroughly decent man’s career.
I don’t think Peter Crouch is the future, nor Joe Cole. If you couldn’t get in this team over four games, then you must be really mediocre.
Aaron Lennon, to my surprise, didn’t impress either. And Gareth Barry turned out to be another unexpected letdown.
As for the big players, I don’t know what we should do with them. You can’t drop the likes of Gerrard, Lampard and Wayne Rooney. On their day, all are genuine world-class talents. But something went badly wrong in South Africa and they never played anywhere near as well as they can.
I would, though, permanently drop David Beckham. He was drafted in to be the squad’s No 1 cheerleader by Capello, meaning he wore the same suit as him and copied everything he did throughout all four games. If Capello jumped up, he jumped up; if Capello shouted, he shouted; if Capello picked his nose...
It was the most embarrassing Mini-Me impression since Phil Neal’s ‘Do I not like that, too’ performance next to Graham Taylor. And it had about the same effect on the team.
If you’re brought in with one specific task, to rally the players to new heights with your supposedly inspiring presence and they then do worse than any England team for decades, we kind of get the message, don’t we?
I suspect most of the players viewed Beckham as a rather irritating, grandstanding bystander and, like me, couldn’t really understand what he was doing there.
As a player, it has been a long time since he was effective at the top level. He chose to play for an American pub team, taking the Hollywood money over a serious career on the pitch, and it dragged him down to a pub team level.
As for ludicrous suggestions that he should now be England manager, I would rather have Ashley Cole, the treacherous midget who informed us this week that he ‘hates England and the ****ing people’. (The feeling’s mutual, trust me).
At least we’d all have a good laugh watching Cashley trying to be The Boss. Which brings me to the main problem – Capello himself.
I can’t actually believe he has not been fired. What more does a manager need to do to get the chop?
After all the pre-tournament excitement, and I openly admit that I, too, thought the Italian was the man finally to bring us silverware. He turned out to be a complete disaster.
His legendary iron-man discipline was a spectacular turn-off to a squad living in prison-camp conditions for weeks on end. You could see how miserable everyone was, especially Rooney.
Capello’s man-management was shocking, too — from refusing to choose his No 1 goalkeeper in the build-up to the tournament to persisting in announcing the team just two hours before a game, seemingly oblivious to the tension this was causing.
As for his tactics, they were embarrassingly shambolic. Sticking rigidly to a laboured 4-4-2 system was, as any remotely intelligent reader of the game could see, plain dumb. It was so predictable that the Germans were able to devise a very simple plan to humiliate us and then execute it perfectly because Capello refused to change anything.
In battle, the best generals go with the flow, adapt to altering conditions; they think on their feet and make quick decisions that switch the course of events. It’s the same with football.
The problem with foreign managers like Sven Goran Eriksson and now Capello is not that they aren’t very good, because their record suggests they are. It’s that they just don’t seem to understand how to make English players perform under the enormous pressure of world and European competitions.
Men like Terry Venables, Sir Bobby Robson and Sir Alf Ramsey did. They knew when to issue the carrot and the stick, when to rant or rave, who to put an arm round and who, verbally, to boot across the dressing room. They knew all this because they were English.
Germany only ever choose German managers and it shows. No language barrier, no cultural differences.
It’s different at club level because in the Premier League so many of the players are foreign anyway. But the England manager has 23 Englishmen staring at him, waiting to be addressed in a way that they can understand and relate to.
That’s why Harry Redknapp was so right to suggest that it’s time we went back to having a home-grown boss at the helm of the national team.
Nobody can tell me that Redknapp wouldn’t have rallied those players in South Africa to perform at a higher level. He’d have slapped Rooney’s backside and ordered him to ‘stop being such a girl’s blouse’, told Terry to ‘shut it’, urged Lampard to ‘do it for the family’, asked Gerrard if he was ‘on bloody valium’, and generally sent one great big rocket up their collective jacksies.
Redknapp would have also known instinctively that you don’t beat the Germans with a 4-4-2 formation and done something about it.
Redknapp’s England would always play with passion, fire, energy and intensity. Four things we never saw from Capello’s when it really mattered.
England were diabolical in this World Cup tournament and it’s a disgrace that Fabio Capello has kept his job.
