Keep faith in your brilliance, don’t bed the staff and you’ll be all right

By the Times chief sports writer Simon Barnes

As Fabio Capello inches closer to the job of England head coach, he prepares for a voyage into the unknown. Running any national team is different from running a club and running the England team presents unique difficulties.

England has a growing reputation for eating football managers. Men have gone into the job with every possible credential – tough, unflappable, capable – and one by one they have ended up on the dining table.

Just as water finds the weak places in a landscape over the course of millennia, so the England job finds the weak places in a man; sometimes, in the case of the lately departed Steve McClaren, in a matter of months.

Recent history gives Capello sound advice. Alas, all the advice is negative, but it is as well to pay attention. For example, if you are approached by a sheikh who promises the earth, make your excuses and leave. Don’t hang around outside Roman Abramovich’s flat with the expression of a man visiting a prostitute. Keep your trousers on at all times when dealing with members of staff.

It’s also a good idea not to put your name to a CD of undemanding classical music.

There are many other obvious pitfalls. Don’t write a book about your job and expect to keep it. If you have eccentric religious beliefs, don’t tell The Times. Don’t burst into tears in the lav – but I don’t think Capello goes for the tears-and-Andrex jag. And, of course, don’t take part in fly-on-the-wall documentaries and say things such as “ Quello non mi piace?”* Don’t try to make the press like you. That’s a mistake they all make. Any attempt to come across as a sympathetic person will fail. Worse, it makes you look like a creep. The idea that you are weak and contemptible passes on to the players; that weakens your authority, hence your ability to win matches. That is why, the longer you stay in the job, the more your authority is undermined and the harder it becomes to win matches.

Is the job genuinely impossible? Any job is impossible if the expectations of your employers are unrealistic. Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997 and everybody believed that Britain would instantly become peaceful, green and happy. We thought we had elected Swampy. Blair failed our expectations, but they were not realistic in the first place.

Absolutely Fabio

By the BBC’s Derek ‘Robbo’ Robson

So Fabio it is. It’s a bit of a blow personally cos I thought I had a real chance once His Specialness turned it down. He’s not an idiot, is he, that fella?

Them that desperately wanted an English manager are going to be disappointed. With those European specs he couldn’t be more continental.

I’ve been to Specsavers meself but them fancy dan goggles always make me look like a German businessman who’s trying too hard.

You can’t argue with the appointment. Everything that’s being said about him fills with me with a sense of security.

He’s a brute in training? Good. Some of our lads need it straight between the eyes. McClaren was so blinking pally-pally it was embarrassing. Sometimes when he spoke dreamily of Stevie G or JT you got the impression he couldn’t believe his luck either.

Del Piero thought he was a tyrant. Yeah and there’s a lad who looks like he likes a sun-lounger and a singapore sling.

He lacks a human side? Fine by me. Probably means he won’t need a brolly.

His track record is brilliant. We have cast-iron proof that the bloke KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING! Not such god news for the England boys. Cos this time we’re not going to be looking a the manager if things go T.U.

He can hardly speak a word of English. Good. He’ll fit in perfectly with the rest of the squad. I never have a clue what Rio Ferdinand’s on about either.

He’ll play effective, unexciting football. Fantastic. I dunno about you but England 2 Croatia 3 is about as exciting as I can stand.

He wants the job. Yeah, I know, what kind of fool is he? It’s about as beautiful a challenge as the one Stephen Ireland commited last weekend (After Nicky Hunt’s effort the previous week I’m beginning to wonder if Irish internationals need a lesson in the perfect slidey - or have they been busy reading the Keano autobiography?)

Clarence Seedorf said: “He would rather have less quality but committed players rather than quality players who are not committed.” Well that just fits the bill perfectly.

Me, I’m happy. The bloke’s about the best available. If Wenger and Fergie think so, then who are we to argue?

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.

£80m an expensive motivational tool

From the Times Gabriele Marcotti

Sometimes change can work in the most unexpected ways. Real Madrid acquired ten players last summer at a cost of about £80 million. It was an attempt to overhaul a team who, under Fabio Capello, won La Liga but supposedly came up short in the entertainment department.

Four months on, Real sit top of La Liga. Is it evidence that spending money guarantees success? Not quite because, amazingly, of Real’s ten newcomers, only one - Wesley Sneijder, the Holland playmaker – has started as many as half the club’s matches this season.

The others’ impact has ranged from the fleeting to the impalpable. Pepe, the £20 million Portugal defender, missed ten weeks with injury. Christoph Metzelder, the Germany centre back, has made six starts, while Royston Drenthe, the much-hyped Dutchman, has made four. The quartet of players who used to ply their trade in England – Arjen Robben, Gabriel Heinze, Júlio Baptista and Jerzy Dudek – have started seven games between them. And the pair of strikers, Javier Saviola (plucked on a Bosman free transfer from Barcelona) and Roberto Soldado (back from his loan spell at Osasuna, where he scored 11 goals in 21 appearances last season) have accumulated only three starts between them.

What is curious here is how Real have thrived without the contribution of those players who were supposed to strengthen the team, but rather relied on the veterans, in some cases the same veterans who were apparently past it. Take Guti, for example. Eleven months ago Ramón Calderón, the club president, was caught on tape lambasting Guti and his unfulfilled potential, saying that he has been “a promising player” for his entire career. This season the 31-year-old, originally pencilled in as a reserve, has been a fixture in midfield, playing some of the best football of his career.

Raúl, the club captain and a veritable superstar early in his career, seemed to hit the skids after his 26th birthday, failing to reach double figures in league goals in each of the past three seasons. This season he has amassed eight league goals already.

Iker Casillas and Sergio Ramos, as always, have been the driving forces defensively and Robinho and Fabio Cannavaro, after disappointing campaigns last season, are back to their best as well. As for Ruud van Nistelrooy, it is the same story: put the ball anywhere near him and he will stick it in the net. His goal against Athletic Bilbao on Saturday evening took his season’s tally to seven in 12 matches and his overall Real record to 32 in 49 appearances.

Contradiction right at heart of the enigma that is Kieren Fallon

By the Times Chief Sports Writer Simon Barnes

Jockeys are a difficult bunch. It’s a mixture of short man’s chippiness and the demands of the job, a series of brusque, even brutal, wham-bam relationships with an endless series of partners. Thus we have the depression of Fred Archer, the pathological meanness of Lester Piggott, Willie Carson’s outbreaks of spitefulness, and even Frankie Dettori has a dark side.

But Kieren Fallon is different. I have had long chats with him on two or three occasions and each time I walked away thinking: “What a nice guy. If only they were all like that.” Fallon’s CV speaks of someone you would cross the M25 to avoid, but the man himself is quite different.

All the same, there was the time when he pulled a rival jockey off his horse — brilliant, in a way, because a racing saddle and an oated-up thoroughbred do not make a stable platform for judo. Whatever else Fallon may be, he is not so much a magnet for trouble as a black hole. Incomprehensible forces of gravitation tug every possible aspect of strife and destruction towards him. And so, even as his corruption trial collapses, we hear that he has failed a drugs test for cocaine, a matter still in the arena of the unproven as we await the findings for the B sample.

And yet the man I met was a champion jockey filled with humility, lost in admiration for Dettori’s style, expressing a touching eagerness to improve. You can see his hidden nature in the way he rides, in the impulsive, nanosecond seizing of a gap. But for the rest — well, he has some of the most well-mannered demons you could possibly wish to be introduced to. One of the strangest men I’ve ever met.

As reports in different newspapers claim that José Mourinho has (a) signed up as England’s next head coach and (b) performed an about-turn and joined Barcelona, the fact to bear in mind is that neither scenario would come as the least surprise. Mourinho obeys neither laws nor conventions. He pleases himself and if he gets the England job, he will do it for himself alone.

I take my hat (and shirt) off to Giggs

I remember attending a football match in which opposition supporters sang of their hatred for Ryan Giggs. Not for the first or the last time, I was bemused by a football crowd. How can anyone hate Ryan Giggs? He’s another of those athletes who lift the heart.

He has just scored his 100th league goal for Manchester United, so it’s a nice moment to applaud him as he lifts his bat, and to muse on the idiosyncratic gallop – at full pace, he is recognisable from half a mile away – and that expression, seen far too often, alas, of profound and innocent bewilderment because the ball that he has struck has failed to find the goal.

If England are to be special again, FA must take a walk on wild side

By the Times Simon Barnes

Say the Football Association and Brian Barwick, its chief executive, could somehow be embarrassed into it. Say that the FA could be chivvied out of its safe-pair-of-hands, risk-averse world-view. And say that the man in question was not, after all, playing games while tarting about for Real Madrid. Just say that all those things happened – then ask yourself, what would it be like?

What would happen if José Mourinho was England manager? Would he actually be any good? What sort of trouble would he find (for all England managers find trouble)? And what weaknesses would he ultimately reveal? (It is one of sport’s eternal laws that every England manager must eventually stand before us exactly as he is.)

It all comes down to Mourinho’s colossal, almost ludicrous sense of self-esteem. That is his strength. It is also his weakness, of course, but let that go for a moment. Let us start at the beginning: the opening press conference, the first meeting with the team.

The job has been discredited by the appointment and subsequent failure of the hapless Steve McClaren, “the reductio ad absurdum of England managers” in Brian Glanville’s telling phrase. Mourinho would restore, in an instant, prestige to the position and, by extension, to the team. Both would be special again.

If I am doing the job, it must be one of the most important jobs in the world: Mourinho would bring that attitude with him and, at a stroke, everything to do with the England team would be important, serious, requiring total commitment. After all, everything that relates to Mourinho’s vanity is important.

The England team would become, in an instant of time, a wonderfully sexy thing. The effect of this, at least at first, would be inspirational. It would be a complete and radical relaunch for the England football team: exactly what is needed.

Now on to the actual football. Sven-Göran Eriksson, when England head coach, empowered his players by treating them as grown-ups, by allowing them to make their own decisions, by trust. Eriksson succeeded admirably, up to a certain point, that point being the quarter-finals of big tournaments.

Mourinho’s methods are radically different. Players are required to worship him, to do all they can to win his confidence. Could these methods secure England’s qualification for the World Cup of 2010? It would be surprising if Mourinho failed to pull it off. He has a capacity to win the loyalty of players at a profound level: very much a two-way street, as he established with his core players at Chelsea, his Untouchables. He can do hard slog; he can make a team who reliably beat the teams they bloody well ought to beat.

This same talent would work in tournament play, that unique form of football that club managers never have to worry about. Success at a World Cup is about getting on a roll. England did that, to an extent, at the World Cups of 2002 and 1990, reaching a level at which success began to seem logical and inevitable. Mourinho is capable of doing that with England, of doing as well as Eriksson.

Geordies should stick with the Dyce man

By the BBC’s Derek ‘Robbo’ Robson

The managerial merry-go-round seems worse than ever.

Geordie friends have been joking darkly about the ‘last roll of the Allardyce’ and calling a Sambulance to take him away.

The only medical attention the big man will need is the surgical removal of a job lot of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. What a masticator he is. They say he’s not a good manager but then how does he manage to chew all that, eh?

Me and Big Sam have a lot in common. We’re big and ugly and we like our players to keep it simple.

Many’s the time the Blue Bell first XI have begged me to let them play football on the grass. The fact is our playing surface makes Wembley look like Centre Court. It’s got more bobbles on it than one of me Nan’s cardies.

I tell ‘em: “Just get it forward and we’ll start playing up their end.”

The Toon Army are not happy with this rustic approach, asking for something a bit more sophisticated, like.

Of course Tynesiders are very sophisticated fellas. Your average fans at St James’s spend the half-time interval discussing Wittgenstein over a bottle of Merlot and some artisan foccacia.

Joey Barton has called the Magpie crowd ‘vicious’, which is laughable. I’d like to know what Joey’s definition of vicious is. Perhaps Ousmane Dabo has a definition too.

If the team churns out abject performances like the ones chucked up against Liverpool and Pompey, you’d have to be an imbecile not to expect some angry supporters.

Mr Ashley aside, the Toon Army go and watch people on vastly superior wages to themselves and for too long too many of them have not been earning it.

It all starts with results of course - and 1-1 against the Arse is not a bad start. It was great that the Evening Chronicle encouraged the fans to get behind the team on Wednesday night. They were rewarded with a bit of oomph for a change.

But when Barton or some other overpaid dimwit starts slagging the fans for getting hacked off then you have to wonder what these players are on. It’s not up to the Gallowgate to make the players do better.

To his credit, Allardyce has not tried spreading the blame around the terraces. The team have been crap against Pompey and Liverpool especially. But the man’s been there for how long? Four months? It’s not like they’re rock-bottom.

There are a few football clubs whose fans seem to exist in a bubble of total self-delusion: Newcastle, Spurs, Villa - your supporters still dwell in some romantic never-never-land where Jackie Milburn, Danny Blanchflower and Dennis Mortimer never got any older and are still just waiting for a first-team call-up even today.

Then there’s the clubs whose fans are realists/miserabilists: Man City, Everton, Boro. We’re just happy to be competing.

Newcastle aren’t very good. Allardyce has as good a chance as any - and certainly a better chance than the scowling Sourness or the droning Roeder - of getting the team winning summat.

If not him, then who? Shearer continues to be an obvious candidate but how can they afford him? Not the wages so much as the celebration.

They’ll fly him in dangling from a black and white helicopter, pump dry ice into the Gallowgate end and every step on the terrace will light up beneath his feet as he puts his foot down, like Michael Jackson doing Billie Jean.

Small children with gather in heavenly choruses on the pitch and coo “There’s no one quite like Shearer!” with Ant ‘n’ Dec and Bryan Ferry accompanying.

Tony Blair’ll embrace him like a brother. And finally a giant hand will pass through the grey murk of the Tyneside sky and gently place his index finger on Sir Alan’s forehead, officially anointing him “The Geordie Saviour, like”.

My advice would be to stick with Sam. There are too many glowering chairmen sitting on managers’ chests like some monstrous millionaire demons. They need to get out of the bleeding way for a while and let the managers manage.

Arsenal Song

Not as good as the Mcclaren tribute but very funny nonetheless. This guy is brilliant.

Thoughts from the weekend

Another weekend has gone by and another round of Premier League games have takenplace which have left much to talk about. Firstly the Chelsea game was downright boring and didn’t really showcase the festival of attacking football which Avram Grant has been talking about and since his arrival they haven’t really been playing much differently to when Mourinho was there. The manager’s been trying to sell this supposed free flowing style but its hard to implement when the players are exactly the same. This Chelsea side is still the exact same physical, defensively sound and annoying side everyone used to hate under Mourinho. I’m also still wondering when Didier Drogba will cease to display the incredible form he has shown over the last 18 months as I still think he is just an average player having a great run. Yes here it comes, a cliche, ‘Form is temporary, Class is Permanent.’ Turning 30 next year i see age catching up to him very soon. I also have to say he is the worst handler of the media I have ever seen. ‘I am a diver,’ ‘I’m not a diver,’ ‘I’m the best player in the world,’ ‘I never wanted to come to Chelsea,’ ‘I love Chelsea,’ ‘I want to leave Chelsea!’

Arsenal showed that they can still play a delicious passing game without Cesc Fabregas as shown by their magnificent first half display against Aston Villa. However Villa provedin the second half that with commitment and tenacity you can get the better of the Gunners. Ashley Young in particular was excellent.

Fernando Torres is not only world class but also one of the most complete strikers in the world. He also makes Kuyt and Voronin look like complete wallies. However he just can’t seem to score away from Anfield which at this stage of the season is sort of justifiable considering he’s still in his ’settling in period.’ Though his away performances in general have been excellent  he just hasn’t found the back of the net. In fact his phenomenal adaptation to his new surroundings just shows that really great players do not need 24 months settling in time as Drogba needed. Shevchenko on the other hand has just been unlucky in the sense that he was passed his peak when he joined Chelsea and that he is never going to adapt considering his age which is now 31.

Sunderland beat Derby, good for them. And Reading drew with Middlesbrough and no one really cares though it was immensely funny when I heard that Boro made a £10 million bid for Ronaldinho which was just as ludicrous as Birmingham making an approach for Marcelo Lippi.

Catch a falling star at your peril, Chelsea

By Matt Dickinson, The Times Chief Sports Correspondent

As Kaká was confirmed as European Footballer of the Year at the weekend, Ronaldinho’s claim to fame was that he started a La Liga match on the bench for the first time since he joined Barcelona. If that were not insulting enough, the twice Fifa World Player of the Year was said by one Spanish newspaper to have been the subject of a bid by Middlesbrough. Enough to wipe off anybody’s goofy grin.

That football’s greatest showman is in a trough is not in doubt and even if he does not have to pack his bags for Teesside, the trajectory of his career should trouble anybody who loves the game. The fear is that even if we have not seen all that Ronaldinho has to offer, we have witnessed the best of him.

He still has the talent and, at 27, he should have the time to reclaim his perch, but does he have the desire to put himself back on top? It is a question that is just as pertinent at Stamford Bridge as the Nou Camp, given Chelsea’s desire to lure the Brazilian.

In August, Roman Abramovich not only met the player’s brother, who doubles as his agent, but also spoke to Barcelona about making an offer. The Chelsea owner was willing to shatter every transfer and salary record but was told to come back next year.

The assumption was that he would and perhaps Chelsea and other buying clubs, which may include AC Milan, will convince themselves that all Ronaldinho needs is a new challenge after a fifth season in Catalonia; that he is simply distracted.

The temptations for Chelsea are obvious at a time when the beautiful game continues to prove elusive, a point maddeningly reinforced by Arsenal’s brilliance across the capital.

Could Abramovich resist the biggest star in football, a match-winner who invented a move – the espaldinha – in which he can pass the ball with a spasm of the shoulder blades? For all of Avram Grant’s talk of entertainment, there has not been much of that at Stamford Bridge.

One glance at Andriy Shevchenko should provide a cautionary tale about the perils of buying big-name players in their late twenties and further research may also persuade Abramovich to go with his head rather than his heart.

Worries over Ronaldinho stretch back to last season, when he rested on the laurels of being Spanish and European champion. Denials that he had missed training sessions were undermined when he stripped off his shirt to reveal what is known by middle-aged men as a rubber ring.