Guts or Not, Still No Glory

Weeks after the Italian dude decided he couldn't be arsed managing the England team anymore, the dust appears to have settled and the matter of the next guy to take the fall is put aside while the more important matter of the league title race is decided. Thankfully.

At the time of writing, it’s looking nailed on that “Honest” Harry Redknapp will get the gig, especially since his acquittal from wrong-doing. His line that he was, essentially, too stupid to have been able to pull off the financial shenanigans he was accused off must surely rank alongside the Chewbacca Defence.

Though you sometimes wonder if it was indeed a front. A rumour was doing the rounds that when the time came to submit his Spurs squad for the Europa League, he knocked up a badly spelled list with "Ask Joe" (being Joe Jordan, his assistant) for the last three names. Scurrilous, perhaps, but somehow believable.

The key word we've heard, once again, bandied around the media is ‘passion’. Capello, being Italian, didn't have it for the job because he was foreign. Not that it appears to have hindered the Irish, mind, with Trappatoni taking a squad of has-beens (Keane, Given, Dunne) and average also-rans to the European Championships. Perhaps the Irish are less fussy - their most successful manager of all time coming from the country that they’d have every right to hate most of all may well have lowered some prejudices.

Redknapp, it has been judged, does have the passion for the job. England needs an Englishman who understands the spirit for the three lions (that most English of animals, natch) and knows the words to God Save The Queen. All 100 verses, and especially the one about battering that lot North of Carlisle.

But let’s stop a minute, and consider the only manager who could really be considered a successful England manager: Sir Alf Ramsey. Look at the footage of when the fourth goal is scored in the 1966 World Cup final – all around is the chaos of English celebration, except for one man. Ramsey remains seated, calm and dignified. This was a man who undertook lessons to tone down his Essex accent into something more ‘respectable’.

He also had little time for the media, which is an area I always thought Capello was on a hiding to nothing. Redknapp, of course, has his column in a newspaper and his son as a pundit on Sky Sports. Like Terry Venables before him, he’s a London boy part of the capital media scene – journalists know they’ll get little bits of information to keep everybody happy. Capello seemed to have no interest in talking to hacks outside his basic duties as England coach: his personal life, for one, was kept strictly off-limits.

In the end, despite a comparatively leisurely progress to the Euro finals this summer, the press were desperate for him to go and have their (or "the people’s") man in. Capello may well have been looking for an excuse to bail – sticking up for John Terry of all people seems an odd way to make a stand – and perhaps he thought that he was on a hiding to nothing in terms of getting any decent results out of the squad.

Not that he was blameless as a coach, presiding over some of the worst performances by an England team at a World Cup since the first two games in Mexico ’86. Additionally, the decision to allow David Beckham to hang around the squad was a beyond odd choice from a coach with so much experience. After the snottering at the hands of the ever-reliable Germans, he doubtless should have taken a leaf from their book and looked to build a squad of hungry young players for 2014. Signs of this were seen when the likes of Danny Welbeck, Phil Jones and Kyle Walker were blooded, but an insistence on keeping Terry, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard in the squad – despite repeated failures in various championships – gave the impression of a man afraid to make all the changes needed.

As things are, we need to see if Redknapp's ego blinds him to common sense and he takes the job. Yet no matter who is in charge, it's a struggle to see England impressing this summer, especially when they have to get past France, Sweden and Ukraine. Comedy hi-jinks may well be there for the nation to enjoy.