After England’s woeful World Cup performance, including finishing second in a pretty easy group, and losing to Germany in what has to be the worst performance by England I’ve ever seen, many are now questioning whether Capello can stay on as England manager.
Do you think he will stay on? He’s just signed a new contract, but there was talk of him resigning if England didn’t make it out of the group stages: what we saw last night wasn’t much better; we’d have better not made it through the group stages instead of humiliating ourselves like that! Do you think he’ll quit on his own volition? Was it really Capello’s fault? I think we need to take a good look at a few of the players, including Rooney, a striker who is arguably the best in the world at club level, but who can’t score in an international!
I know [DEL]some[/DEL]most of the players performed woefully, but after the second German goal, if John Terry or Gerrard hadn’t spotted the gaps that needed plugging, Capello and Pearce should have, so I’d sack the pair of them.
Who would we replace him with? The salary’s nice but the last three managers have “failed”, so there’s obviously something fundamental that needs to change.
I think he should go. I take an old fashioned view of leadership which says that when your team fails, as manager you should shoulder the bulk of the responsibility.
In any case, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to conclude he’s totally lost the confidence of the players. The players haven’t conducted themselves very well either but he’s come across as totally inflexible and unwilling to take direction from the players he’s supposedly trying to motivate. I’m not sure there’s any way back from that.
I don’t think the coach is the problem. England’s problems are systemic and go back years, decades in fact. He may have made some misjudgements, I don’t know, but he was dealt a terrible hand with the players he had, and his previous record strongly suggests that he is a very good manager. Can’t see that we’d easily find a better replacement. At least he has had one tournament with England now, he’s seen how bad things really are, and maybe will reflect on it and form some new ideas about the problems and how to address them. So I’d certainly keep him for the Euros and see what he can do. Not expecting huge success in that tournament, but it would be good to see England playing as a more convincing team.
Keep him. I am sick of the trend of giving out these cast iron contracts and then paying off the manager at the first hitch. Either stick with them for the contract or put in clauses about poor performance termination, but please please stop the huge payoffs.
Probably best to keep him, but I don’t think it will make much difference either way as the next generation of players who could turn things around are years away. Given that the squad for Euro 12 will be largely the same (insert weeping anguish emoticon here), the alternative is to sack Capello and put Redknapp in - it would not be a forward looking move (at all), but I think he’d do well with the current crop of players. Then the whole lot of them could be purged after that.
I wasn’t that suprised by England’s poor play - with the exception of Rooney. He really was exceptionally bad. He usually plays with such natural touch and intelligence, even when he’s having a bad game his skills are apparent. He looked like an amateur at times in SA.
Precisely. I thought England had a chance this time around because of Capello, not in spite of him. Who, honestly, could have done a better job? Yes, I think that his tactics in the second half of the Germany loss left a lot to be desired, but IMHO it was the players, not Capello, who made England look bad.
There’s plenty of blame to go round for England’s shabby performance: more than one squad member apparently not giving a fark, Rooney apparently leaving his brains and ability at home, Tim Green’s shock horror, the Premier League raiding the youngster development system for financial gain, the media going apeshite over personal scandals and the merest hint of the same, and so on and so on. I’m struggling, though, to figure out what Capello could have done differently to get a different result, with what he had out there on the pitch.
Although you can argue that what he had out on the pitch was his selection. He chose those players. As an example, would the option to throw Walcott on have helped? Well tough luck, because he got left at home.
He seemed very reluctant to change tactics when it wasn’t working, the prime example being the first two games with Heskey up front. There’s also the age-old question of whether Gerrard and Lampard belong on the same pitch as each other.
I still say keep him. People have to learn from their mistakes. Constantly changing managers doesn’t help anyone.
You’re kidding? Considering the importance of a decent showing in a knock-out round, to start out by giving the Germans a 2 goal lead via defending usually seen by a drunken pub team, is as bad an opening scenario as I can imagine.
Okay, we got going for 3 minutes in the period when we scored our “goals”, but after that we were a shambles again.
The Algeria performance was far, far worse. We also performed well for more than “3 minutes”. Remember that the 3rd and 4th goals only came in the final third of the game, when England had to push forward to score a goal which they had already scored.
Germany’s first goal was literally the worst defending by a supposedly world class national side that I’ve ever seen. The Algeria game was nowhere near that bad.
On the other hand, against Germany they actually showed some attacking threat. The Algeria game could have gone on for three hours and it would still have been 0-0.
The pundits are already going on about English players’ technical weaknessess - but Terry, Lampard and Ashley Cole (for example) are key members of the Chelsea team that won the Double this year and reached the Champions League final a couple of years back. Chelsea have an Italian manager and Abramovitch’s chequebook - if Terry and co are untalented cloggers being propped up by the team around them, why hasn’t he bought some quality replacements?
All the squad play in the Premier League - they should at least deliver a Premiership performance. On the basis of this and their 2006 performance, England wouldn’t threaten the Championship. The only conclusions I can come to are either that the players aren’t flexible enough to operate outside their comfort zones, or they just aren’t as professional about playing for England as they are in their day jobs. Short of installing a firing squad in the changing room, I’m not sure what the coach can do about that…
He should go if your opinion is that the buck stops with the coach. He should stay if you actually want to try and fix the situation, because he is not the problem. Sacking him will feel good but there is a bigger problem here, I thin the truth is that England simply aren’t that good. I mean of course they are good, but they aren’t the elite of the elite. And they go into these tournaments as if they just have to show up, starting with the E.A.S.Y. group designation.
It’s not even that bad of a performance, really, in terms of the dry statistics of the matter. I mean obviously it was a horror story in terms of their actual play - X-rated stuff. But if you said England will go unbeaten in their group, qualify for the next round then get outclassed by one of the elite teams - that sounds about right given their WC record.