Abby Brammell

By Mark Ryan

'There was no spirit. They weren't playing like they do for their clubs. They played with fear': Fabio Capello on the England team


England will start sloppily, battle bravely with flashes of brilliance to the quarter-finals and then crash out on penalties. We know the script by now. But if the World Cup does play out like that, the England manager will never forgive himself. Fabio Capello, after all, is the man who caused the introduction of shoot-outs in the first place.

'I never made the connection until you brought it up,' he tells Live. 'What can I say? Sorry.'

The story is a bit of a heartbreaker. In 1970, Capello was playing for Roma in the European Cup Winners' Cup.

'We reached the semi-finals and played a Polish team called Gornik Zabrze,' he says. 'We played them for 330 minutes: three matches, two with extra time, I scored two penalties, but it was still a draw. So the tie was decided by the toss of a coin. We called heads.' It was tails...

The result was considered so cruel and ridiculous that Fifa introduced penalty shoot-outs the very next year. In that moment, England's fate was effectively sealed for the rest of the century and beyond. By now we are so used to shoot-out pain that we helplessly expect the worst. But not this time, vows the manager.

'No,' Capello insists. 'We'll be ready for penalties if they come. We know how to play without fear now - in all situations.'

The Italian is a hard man to talk to - even by the super-protective standards of international football. His agent is his son, Pierfilippo, and naturally puts his father's needs way ahead of those of the media. Capello himself sees publicity as a disease - one of his first acts on taking over the England team in January 2008 was to insist his players do as little as possible and he leads by example.

But I've met Capello, 63, several times as a football reporter. I remind him that the first time, in 1995 at AC Milan's training ground, he told me how little he thought of England's team tactics: they ran a lot and were very strong but not good technically. They lacked the imagination of the South Americans, who he held up as the world's best.

'I remember my first training session with England,' he says (our interview is conducted in Italian).

'I was surprised. The players were really good. But when I saw them playing in a friendly against Switzerland I understood everything about why they hadn't qualified for Euro 2008. There was no spirit. They weren't playing like they do for their clubs. They played with fear. I said to myself, this is a big problem of the mind. I have to work a lot on this.'

At the last World Cup, negative thoughts entered players' heads at the vital moment - both Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard admitted as much. To combat this, Capello has hired 'mental-strength coach' Christian Lattanzio, formerly of West Ham. He wants the players to tell themselves they are going to score; he wants them to believe they have the power to make people happy.


'A coach has to plan a match. He has to choose a formation. He has to scrutinise the souls of the players and perceive their fears, anxieties and nervousness,' said Fabio


Fortunately, Capello is not relying soley on Lattanzio's techniques for success. His England practise penalties after every training session. The responsibility weighs heavily on his shoulders - and not just for penalties.

'A coach has to plan a match,' he says. 'He has to choose a formation. He has to scrutinise the souls of the players and perceive their fears, anxieties and nervousness. He must not make a wrong move. For a coach there is no way out. You can have done everything perfectly but if your opponents score with a long shot, you're an idiot. A footballer thinks about himself; I have to think about 23 players.'

Can you be their friend?
'No, definitely not. And I shouldn't try.'

It's true what they say about Capello's presence - there is 'an aura about him', as Wayne Rooney puts it. One way of exerting his authority is to insist on silence in the dressing room: players must wait for Capello to say the first words - and must not expect to be mollycoddled. He's not above insulting players to their face if he thinks it will sting them into action.

But where does that iron in the soul come from? Maybe you have to look back to 1943, when Fabio's father, Guerrino, was captured by Germans pulling out of Italy. He was kept on starvation rations for two years. Weighing just six stone on his release, he refused to return to his wife Evelina until he had gained enough weight to be a proper husband. Less than a year later, Fabio was born in the village of Pieris in north-east Italy.

'We're really straight, strong people where I'm from,' Capello says. 'We have to work. Big discipline. Respect was the most important thing to my father. He always told me never to be like a lamb.

'I remember when I was four years old, we went on a trip to the coast. My father helped me to climb up onto a rock and then he went down into the water and told me to throw myself in. I must have been ten metres up but I did it, even though I couldn't really swim


'(Wayne) Rooney's scored a lot of goals this season. I hope he maintains the same form until South Africa. He is like a bull'


Capello takes the same tough paternal line with his team - Wayne Rooney describes him as a strict father. England players were told shortly after he took over they'd only be seeing their wives and girlfriends once a week in South Africa, Capello comparing the influence of WAGs to a virus. Mobile phones were banned at meals, and players were given a strict 10pm curfew and expected to turn up for training 30 minutes early.

'You have to be demanding,' he says. 'I wouldn't say working with an iron fist, but the players have to know that we're here to work. We have to put in the effort. My target is to play in the final. I think that if all players are fit, we can beat all the teams.'

He takes nothing for granted in England's so-called easy group, insisting that previous victories over the USA and Slovenia count for nothing in South Africa. Then there is Algeria, a side England has never played.

'They are so well organised, they are like a European team,' he says.

'We've studied them very carefully and we'll be ready. As for the later stages, Spain have a confidence, a system of play that makes it difficult to beat them, and they don't rely on one player to score the goals.

'Brazil, I think, are a very difficult team to beat and Argentina have improved a lot since they qualified.

'There are the Germans and Italians. And another team who are very good are Holland. They could be a danger.'

For all the dangers, Capello has absolute confidence in his 23, particularly the star striker.

'Rooney's scored a lot of goals this season. I hope he maintains the same form until South Africa. He is like a bull.'

Capello reckons the 2010 team are as professional as any group he's come across, despite scandals off the pitch.

'They listen and they do as they are told on the training pitch, and that isn't always the case in countries like Italy or Spain. Off the pitch, they are not so different to players from other countries. It's just that the media focus is different.'

Despite the intense media scrutiny, Capello says he enjoys life in England.

'I love my job and my lifestyle in London. My wife Laura is happy here, too.'


source: dailymail