THE BENEFITS OF HAVING A REAL COACH:

England are rescued by Capello's old school values (James Lawton, 8/13/09, Independent)

Rio Ferdinand, perhaps the most eloquent advocate of the Capello way, and Gareth Barry, one of the newer members of English football's plutocracy, made mistakes so nonchalant it was difficult to understand quite what had filled their heads before coming out on to the field. It was not, we could be sure, the driving philosophy of their coach, which is based almost entirely on the belief that professional respect is something that has to come afresh with each new performance.

Ferdinand and Barry committed almost identical crimes, passing the ball to the feet of opponents in positions which gave their colleagues, most notably the traumatised goalkeeper Rob Green, little serious chance of preventing goals. Capello, naturally, was not so much surprised as aghast.

In past regimes we might have expected a wholesale disintegration of faith, pretty much of the dimension that came in Copenhagen on the approach to the World Cup of 2006. Then England defended quite as haplessly but for rather longer and the 4-1 defeat cast a huge shadow over the prospects of Sven Goran Eriksson's England.

Capello's England though have a different kind of imperative, a rather strong force. Capello has the capacity to find pockets of resistance to the most unpromising fate, and last night his famed half-time conversations, which can as sweet, apparently as a master diplomat's or a ferocious as a demented sergeant major's, had perhaps their most dramatic effect since he arrived here 18 months ago.

The England coach effectively re-made his team at half-time, leaving Ferdinand, whose concentration has been known to slip before but remains a player of often quite imperious quality on the field, but yanking off Barry, a man who not for the first time had given some worrying hints that he might well have been promoted, both in club and international football, somewhat above his station.

Most significantly, he brought on Jermain Defoe, who scored two goals with brilliant opportunism. They were his ninth and 10th goals for England, and here we have, surely, a gathering body of evidence that he may well travel the full course to next summer's World Cup finals in South Africa. New force was also provided by Carlton Cole, James Milner and Michael Carrick, a player who surely offers potentially more much to the creative instincts of the side than Barry.

Suppose, for a second, you thought the US starting XI made sense yesterday. No one can have by halftime. And yet the same eleven started the 2nd half...

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 13, 2009 6:09 AM