All the FA wants for Christmas is a chairman with ideas and character

From the Times chief sports correspondent Matt Dickinson

The interviews are being carried out in secret, the chosen candidate will be presented before Christmas and the ramifications for English football could be far-reaching. So, who is going to be the FA’s new independent chairman?

If you care about the fate of the England team in ten or twenty years’ time, and not only the chances of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup, it should be occupying your thoughts every bit as much as the manoeuvrings of José Mourinho and Fabio Capello.

It is not, of course, which is why it is worth asking how seriously we take the wide-ranging issues that have been raised since England’s dismal failure to qualify for Euro 2008. The woeful neglect of sport in state schools may seem less urgent once Brian Barwick, the FA’s chief executive, has snared his “world-class” manager. There may not be so many angry discussions about the size of children’s pitches once Fabio Capello, the high-class successor to Steve McClaren, sits at the top table with Barwick beaming in the chair beside him.

Once the national team improve, as they surely will even under a man whose English is not perfect, we will go back to laughing along with the John Smith’s “ ’Ave it” advertisement rather than acknowledging, ruefully, that it reveals a national weakness. A familiar complacency will take hold unless someone stops it and who better than someone starting afresh, someone from outside the game, someone installed right at the top of the pyramid? The new independent chairman, like the next England head coach, should be appointed in time for the next FA board meeting on December 19.

If this seems to be putting a lot of significance on a man in a suit, we should first acknowledge the restrictions that will greet him. He will join an FA that remains encumbered by a laborious committee structure. The 92-man council, complete with its representatives from the Forces and Oxbridge, continues to be a ludicrous anachronism. The Burns report, the recent structural review of the organisation, was just a bit of tinkering.

But all of this just makes the choice of independent chairman more important - and it makes it critical that the man chosen has courage, conviction and dynamism. At a time when the two leading organisations, the Premier League and FA, are in deadlock over something as important as youth development, the national sport has never been more in need of someone to knock heads together. Gerry Sutcliffe, the Sports Minister, has yet to show that he has anything to offer either for children or the elite.

Will we get a man of boldness? We are dependent on a four-man headhunting panel that has been led by Lord Mawhinney, the chairman of the Football League, who would love the job. Some suggest that the new chairman’s independence is already compromised, given Mawhinney’s influence.

And with the shortlist thought to be down to Sir Roy Gardner and Lord Triesman of Tottenham, there are mutterings within the game that the FA is not about to be chaired by a man who will pull up trees.

That Gardner, the chairman of Compass, the catering group, and former chief executive of Centrica, which owns British Gas, has business acumen can hardly be questioned. But, from his period as chairman of Manchester United, he is remembered for his reluctance to stand up to Sir Alex Ferguson when the manager threw himself recklessly into his battle with the Coolmore Stud owners. Gardner’s last act as chairman was to ask for four season tickets in the directors’ box for life. He was refused, which may say something.

Triesman, a leading anti-racism campaigner and Tottenham Hotspur fan, is described as well-intentioned, although some worry that he may prove too much the politician, trying to be all things to all men – and boy, does sports administration in this country already have enough of them.

As a former general secretary of the Labour Party – before the illegal donations, he insists – he is now the serving minister for intellectual property. How much time he would have to give to the FA role remains to be seen.

It is a significant appointment at a time when the national game needs strong leadership and there must be a concern that, unless the new man can work fast, an opportunity will be missed. The failure to reach Euro 2008 has generated a deep public anger that our national sport can be so awash with money and yet incapable of producing a player worthy of Arsenal’s first team, or a single manager for the FA’s shortlist. That anger needs harnessing because it may dissipate quickly.

Once Capello is in charge, the senior team should improve match by match. An expert handler of overblown egos and a man with seemingly impressive disregard for his own popularity, the Italian should be capable of leading England to victory over Belarus, Kazakhstan and perhaps even Croatia on the road to the 2010 World Cup finals. All will be right again with our national sport, but only on the surface.

Fabio Capello may have banished David Beckham from the Real Madrid team for a period, but he has since spoken fondly of the England player.

Whether it is fondly enough for Beckham to be granted his 100th cap will be one of the first questions from the floor (presumably through an interpreter) if the Italian does end up in front of the English media.

On top of Beckham’s future, Capello’s tendency to play two holding midfield players makes the long-term prospects for Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard intriguing; it certainly makes it highly unlikely that the two would be paired together. Incidentally, the last time Capello stood on a touchline in England was to watch his Juventus team outplayed by Arsenal in the Champions League, with indiscipline reducing the Italian side to nine men. Looking on in the pouring rain, Capello seemed helpless, but such nights tend to be infrequent, to judge from his CV.

“We’re friendly enough now,” Steve Gibson, the Middlesbrough chairman, said of Steve McClaren at the weekend, before adding: “If Steve said to me the grass is green, I would go out and check.” By kicking a man while he is down, Gibson shows himself to have an odd grasp of what it means to be friendly.

It is so unfashionable to defend the former England head coach that this may count as an exclusive. But here goes. In McClaren’s time on Teesside as Middlesbrough manager, the club won the Carling Cup, the only trophy in their history, finished seventh in the league and reached the Uefa Cup final. On present standing, they qualify as the glory years.

For more from Matt Dickinson click here