England’s performance against Andorra at the weekend may have been “Doomsday anti-football,” but James Lawton liked what he saw in Coach Fabio Capello’s body language.
“Whatever the limitations of the England performance, and they were plain enough,” he writes in a column well worth reading in full, “it was surely reassuring to note that for once impatience in the dug-out was as intense, and as forcefully expressed, as that heard from any rabid, English-occupied corner of Barcelona’s Montjuic Stadium.”
Capello’s demeanor reflected a professional indignation rarely seen in his predecessors Sven Goran Eriksson and Steve McClaren, who mostly “had the blinking confusion and pain of powerless victims of a car smash.” Rather than praise the scorer of both goals, Joe Cole, or the man who set one up, Wayne Rooney, Capello upbraided them both “for what he felt was nothing so much as dereliction of professional duty when they failed to support properly the lonely front man Emile Heskey in the closing stages” of the game.
When England last beat Andorra, under the woeful McClaren, goal scorer Steven Gerrard was “dressed in the clothes of a hero rather than a professional of fabulous reputation who had managed to produce some of the best of his talent.” But at the weekend England, thanks to Capello’s reaction, came out of “an essentially no-win situation with at least a degree of professional attitude.”