FA narrows search for England post

The Football Association has created a shortlist of targets for the vacant England manager post, chairman David Bernstein has revealed.

Stuart Pearce is currently in control of the England team until a permanent successor to Fabio Capello is found, with Tottenham boss Harry Redknapp the favourite for the vacancy.

“The process is quite clear,” Bernstein told reporters. “The Club England board have been clearly mandated by the FA board to find a new manager for England.”

“At the last board meeting we agreed our intent would be to make a recommendation of one person to the FA board, we won’t be doing lists of people and the nature of people we are going to be looking at focuses on a very small number of high quality people.”

“We have now arrived at a number of target names, I would call it a flexible target list because it’s not absolutely fixed in stone and we will react to events depending how events unfold.”

“We would intend to deal with this at the back end of the season but it could be earlier, if certain things fell into place and the key appointment came, it could be earlier.”

With Euro 2012 just three months away, a new manager will have little time to adjust to the role and Bernstein insists that the process is being taken care of in a timely fashion.

He said: “We are treating this with the greatest urgency and under no circumstances should our taking time over this be taken as anything other than dealing with it professionally and urgently.”

“We don’t believe rushing this process is going to be good for arriving at the right conclusion.”

“We are also doing this treating clubs and managers with the greatest of respect, we don’t want to disrupt the season of the clubs.”

“Most of the people we are looking at are in positions and whatever we do we ought to try and do it in a way which enables clubs to finish their season with the minimum of disruption.”

“Our next step is to narrow that target list down to a very small number of key people who of course we believe actually want the position. There may be other people who don’t actually want this position.”

“We will of course be conforming to very best practices as you would expect from the FA.”