Posts Tagged ‘Kazakh’

Capello’s authority is paying dividends

England’s coach comes across as stern and cool but the players like him and it shows in their results

A former Soviet republic with a hardline president was an ideal setting to observe Fabio Capello’s authoritarian style of leadership and the lasting impression from England’s faltering first 40 minutes in Kazakhstan is of managerial fury.

Capello’s gesticulations are imported performance art. The gushes of anger through a generally clenched body yield a rich array of arm-throwing gestures that leave his players in no doubt of his displeasure. By the end England had cruised to a sixth consecutive victory towards qualifying for next year’s South Africa World Cup but not before Capello had bullied a team whose weariness was more forgivable than their positional indiscipline.

The England coach had told his team to “expect” a Kazakh assault fuelled by patriotic fervour. John Terry’s men confessed to having slept badly in Almaty on account of a five-hour time-lag. The Kazakh dervish was their unwanted alarm call. It found Glen Johnson (right-back) dozing and Ashley Cole (left-back) sleepwalking too far forward when the manager expected him to be in defensive lock-down mode. Gareth Barry was evidently dreaming of Manchester City. Capello let them all know it with a succession of convulsions that threatened to detach his hands from his wrists.

So fierce was his rebuke to Cole that “Cashley” fired a few words back at the bench, the first known case of an England player defying the bespectacled martinet. The coach’s point was that England should weather Kazakhstan’s enthusiasm from sound defensive positions and then assume control of the game. Instead they appeared intent on fighting fire with fire from an advanced position and were surrendering possession far too frequently for an Italian’s taste.

“In the first half I was disappointed with the position of some of our players. It was impossible to get my message across,” Capello reported. On the surface these fiery exchanges between an aficionado of order and a team who have been specialists in chaos in tournaments will leave no mark in the annals of long-haul travel. It did, though, point to Capello’s enduring belief that English players cannot always be trusted to apply strong tactical thinking to high-pressure moments. His brand of supervision is the polar opposite of that practised by Sven-Goran Eriksson and Steve McClaren.

Laissez-faire has been scratched out of his dictionary. It was the gravy smell of Football Association largesse that drew him to London but he is not the sort to scoop up easy money without giving effort in return. England have now struck 20 times in six qualifiers. Wayne Rooney, who was often semi-detached under the old regime, has scored eight in six outings and has become one of Capello’s lieutenants on the field. When Shaun Wright-Phillips was midway through a cameo of extraordinary carelessness, in the second-half, it was Rooney who applied the flamethrower of collective disgust.

“The manager is a strong manager and none of us want to let him down,” said Rooney before the game. This is one of the more significant statements of Capello’s reign and not just because Rooney is finally finding his natural voice (his declaration last week that the middle is his best position was unusually bold, given that it was bound to be painted as a memo to Sir Alex Ferguson). Jonny Wilkinson used to say the same about Martin Johnson when English rugby was in its pomp. Some players, especially English ones, prefer to be told what to do, provided the results suggest the dictator is blessed with wisdom as well as strength.

Described as “surly” and uncommunicative by Chelsea’s Carlo Ancelotti last week, Capello certainly conforms to a model of loftiness that most of the Champions League regulars seem to like. They know he has unlocked the potential of this England squad by finding a coherent tactical shape and imposing the more professional tone of a big club striding into a major Champions League tie.

But he is colder, more brutal, in his touchline urgings than even Rafa Benítez. Cole’s indignant reaction to one of his barrages reminded us that these one-man corporations are not infinitely receptive to being treated as unruly toddlers. It is natural for Capello to stop a training session to berate his players or grab one by the shoulders to illustrate a point. For FA grandees this has become something of spectator sport.

The enemy now, after England have increased their haul to 21 points, against Andorra on Wednesday, is complacency in the home games with Croatia and Belarus and the visit to Ukraine. Capello’s eruptions in Almaty say he is alive to this risk. He is the jockey who knows he is on a horse that has to be flogged all the way to the line.

The key challenges facing the FA’s new chief executive

Ian Watmore must focus on 10 pressing areas when he takes up his role at Soho Square

When Ian Watmore arrives at Soho Square today for his first day as FA chief executive, he will not immediately be packing his bags for Kazakhstan to accompany the England team for Saturday’s World Cup qualifier. Instead, he will spend his first week in the job meeting key staff and trying to set out his priorities.

The decision to stay behind is not intended as a snub to England’s Kazakh hosts, but can be interpreted as a clear statement of intent that he will not let the glamorous side of the job – the England circus and all the baggage it entails – interfere with the important business of running the FA and re-establishing it as the voice and regulator of English football at all levels.

Here are 10 of the most pressing challenges that Watmore, an Arsenal fan with a reputation as a quietly effective operator with little desire to use the job to project his own ego, will face as Brian Barwick’s successor.

1 Burton

Decision time is looming on the National Football Centre in Burton. The FA has spent an estimated £25m buying and developing the land and may need at least another £35m to complete the project. Despite a firm commitment to go ahead, the likely opening has slipped to 2011 from 2010. And there is still a range of dissenting voices about the location and purpose of the centre. Envisaged as a centre of excellence for coaches, sports scientists, nutritionists and more, as well as providing a training base for the England team, Watmore will have to remake a compelling case that ties into a long-term vision for the FA’s wider role in youth development.

2 Youth development

A long-running impasse between the professional game and the FA concerning the best way to structure youth development is crying out for Watmore to break the logjam. Amid speculation about his future, the FA’s director of football development, Sir Trevor Brooking, had a public war of words with the Football League chairman, Lord Mawhinney, late last year over how youth development should best be funded. The professional game believes that development money is best channelled through them, leaving the FA to “coach the coaches”. But FA insiders point out that they also have grassroots football to consider and the infrastructure for the entire amateur game to worry about. Watmore has made the issue one of his top priorities.

3 Wembley

The new national stadium, the final bill for which approached almost £1bn and the legal fallout from which is still rumbling, continues to cast a shadow. Despite widespread praise for the stadium, the pitch continues to create headlines. More seriously, Watmore must oversee the financial viability of the subsidiary that runs the stadium. It is confident the recession will not affect its business plan, which relies heavily on corporate debentures, but it must also negotiate the refinancing of loan repayments that fall due every year until 2016. Watmore also faces the internal challenge of maintaining staff morale as he manages the move of hundreds of staff from their existing West End location to new offices at Wembley. Along with a round of redundancies, the prospect of trading in the restaurants of Soho for the kebab shops of the North Circular has done little for morale.

4 Reforming the FA

This falls more squarely in his chairman’s lap, but their fates will be intertwined. Since the Burns review delivered its conclusions in 2005, progress has been painfully slow. An independent chairman, in the shape of Lord Triesman, is in place and represents some progress. But the overhaul of the FA’s structure that the review so urgently highlighted, including widening the membership of the FA Council to better represent the game’s stakeholders and introducing non-executive directors to the main board, appears to have ground to a halt. Triesman got the job on a reform ticket but appears now to believe he must tread more carefully. Perhaps he has been waiting for Watmore’s arrival to act.

5 Drug testing

On 1 July new rules requiring a pool of the top 20 footballers in England to make their whereabouts known for an hour of every day are due to be introduced under the new World Anti-Doping Agency code. But an ongoing spat between Fifa and Wada, and criticism from some athletes, has clouded the implementation of the new rules. UK Sport, responsible for administering the tests, is adamant the new rules will be introduced, even if it takes two or three months. The FA has hitherto been more equivocal, and clubs, the players’ union and agents are far from convinced. It will fall to Watmore to defuse a potentially volatile situation.

6 Political landscape

The FA has decided upon, but has yet to deliver, its answers to Andy Burnham’s seven questions on the future of the game. While reasonably arguing that it has a far wider base of opinion to consult, the seven-month delay left the organisation looking leaden-footed against the Premier League and the Football League. Triesman found himself frustrated at only being able to follow the consensus of the earlier proposals from the professional game, after the board blocked his more radical ideas; hardly the ideal basis on which to launch a bid to re-establish the FA as the game’s authoritative voice. Watmore must also hit the ground running in making his way around the boardrooms of England and the backwaters of the county game in an effort to win a broad base of support. In this, he may be helped by the fact he does not come from a Premier League background, unlike his main rival for the job, the former Arsenal chief executive Keith Edelman. Yet he must also heal the lasting wounds caused by his chairman’s attack on the lack of accountability and financial management among top-flight clubs last year. But diplomacy is said to be among his strengths and he has already met the Premier League chief executive, Richard Scudamore.

7 TV rights/commercial deals

Given that he is succeeding a former ITV and BBC head of sport and is just one year into a new four-year broadcast deal, Watmore may have hoped that would be one thing he did not have to worry about. But the uncertainty surrounding Setanta’s future and ITV’s attempt to “smooth” its payment schedules on their joint £425m deal for the FA Cup and England internationals will give him pause for thought. Whichever way things go for Setanta, the FA is confident that a combination of money already banked and the possibility of reselling the rights will not force it to take a hit. But the real challenge will come when the sale process begins again in two years’ time. With little competition in the market, it may be hard to maintain value. Watmore will also want to mull the hardy perennial of how to maintain the profile and allure of the FA Cup in an ever more crowded football calendar.

8 World Cup 2018

Although the bid for the World Cup is run by a separate company and led by Andy Anson, the FA and the bid vehicle share a chairman in Lord Triesman. Watmore will not be directly involved but the two are umbilically linked and the successes and failures of each will impact on the other, as seen with the furore over the lack of representation for black and ethnic minority groups at the launch. A successful bid would create a feelgood factor that could not help but benefit Watmore’s tenure.

9 Discipline/Respect

The first season of the FA’s high-profile Respect campaign has delivered mixed results. How the initial findings are communicated and how the campaign is taken forward will be crucial to re-establishing the FA’s image as a body that is able to take a lead on issues that affect all levels of the game.

10 England

It is one of the delights and the frustrations of the job that Watmore could be an unalloyed success in all of the above and still come under pressure if England fail to deliver on the field. He has some leeway from the fact that he comes into the job with England well placed to qualify for South Africa 2010 and with a manager who is not his appointment but looks every inch the man for the job. Establishing a good working relationship at an early stage with Fabio Capello and his staff will, of course, be crucial.