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Unfinished business fuels Capello´s World Cup hunger

SoccerNews in English Premier League, World Cup 22 Sep 2009

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England’s World Cup rivals should take note: Fabio Capello has unfinished business with the world’s biggest sporting event.

The Italian who has guided England to next year’s finals in South Africa with two games to spare, has been unfamiliar with failure as a coach.

As a player however, Capello learned what it was like to suffer crushing professional disappointment and World Cups loom large in his personal scrapbook of regrets.

The 63-year-old is easily caricatured as a man with no room for sentimentality in his life.

Yet he becomes almost wistful when he reflects on what might have been in 1974, when an Italian squad managed by the late Ferruccio Valcareggi arrived in West Germany as the form team in European football.

“We arrived as one of the favourites but after three games, Poland, Argentina and Haiti, we were back home,” Capello recalled in the wake of England’s 5-1 hammering of Croatia earlier this month.

“What happened? You’d have to ask the manager.”

Worse was to follow. Having played in the qualifiers for the 1978 finals, Capello, then still in his prime as a string-pulling midfielder, learned from a television report that he had been left out of the final 22 that travelled to Argentina.

A suggestion that he must have been injured to have missed out, was greeted with a rueful half-smile and an insight into how he digested rejection.

“Not injured,” he said with a tut and a shake of his index finger. “Not good enough!”

Capello knows that, come the end of this season, it will be his task to inflict similar disappointment on some of the players who have performed well for him since he took over an England squad struggling to cope with the confidence-shredding impact of their failure to reach Euro 2008.

He offers no guarantee that any player receiving the kind of news that resulted in Paul Gascoigne wrecking his hotel bedroom before the 1998 finals will be treated any more compassionately than he was by Enzo Bearzot.

“It’s a good question. I have to decide about that,” he said when asked if players who fail to make the cut would be told of their fate individually.

Such comments serve to bolster the reputation for ruthlessness in pursuit of success that Capello has acquired over the course of a coaching career that has seen him win nine league titles with Milan, Juventus, Roma and Real Madrid.

But dialogue between manager and players plays a greater role in his England regime than his ‘Don Fabio’, autocratic image would suggest.

At least three household names have this year been given explanations as to why they are not in the Italian’s first-choice England XI and what they have to do if they are to get there in time for South Africa.

“Some players ask me why they don’t play, so, sure, I explain,” he says. “My door is always open.

“The players respect me, I respect them, this is very important. Sometimes I speak to them individually, this is my job, my system.”

It is a system that has worked well enough to date for Capello to have set the exacting target of a place in the World Cup final at Johannesburg’s Soccer City on July 11.

Anything less, with the players he has at his disposal, Capello will regard as a disappointment, and, when it comes to World Cups, he has had enough of those.

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