Harry Redknapp may never match Fabio Capello for trophies but he looks a far better fit as England manager
So the formidably austere Fabio Capello ? austere in every respect but his financial demands, that is ? was not, after all, the man for the age of austerity. The Italian martinet, fawned over in some quarters for bringing the promise of order and discipline to a directionless rabble, failed to make his authority count. Out with the austere, then, and very probably in with the cuddly, amusing, utterly human Harry Redknapp, who gets in and out of scrapes and sometimes allows himself to be presented as the sort of caricature of an English football manager depicted in the much?missed adventures of Private Eye's Ron Knee.
Once more, then, the England seesaw tilts, ejecting one rider as it hits the ground with a violent impact while the other end soars into the air ? in the certain knowledge that its rider, too, will shortly come crashing down. From one extreme to the other, yet again. Get rid of a gimlet-eyed taskmaster, appoint a passionate defender of the traditional virtues of the English game, all heart and undisguised patriotism. And when he disappoints, go looking for another no-nonsense technocrat to strip away the excess emotion that appears to be getting in the way of the team's ability to realise its potential.
That is the way of it with England, and so it has been since Graham Taylor ? rendered unconvincing, when things went wrong, by the lack of a distinguished playing career ? gave way to the former star winger Terry Venables. In turn Venables, betrayed by his fondness for a business deal, was succeeded by Glenn Hoddle, in a swap that also replaced a crafty, streetwise coach at ease amid the dressing room culture of English football with one thought to exist on a loftier tactical and intellectual plane.
When Hoddle's views on reincarnation ? clumsily expressed, but shared with millions of Buddhists around the world ? cost him the job, in came Kevin Keegan, his heart pinned to his sleeve, a cheerful antidote to the dangers of too much cerebral activity. When Keegan failed through a lack of tactical nous, leaving the team dishevelled, the FA turned for the first time to a foreigner: Sven-Goran Eriksson, the cool Swede who promised a return to order and serenity.
Rejected despite three quarter-final appearances that were not considered a suitable dividend from the so-called golden generation, Eriksson was inevitably followed by an Englishman. The promotion of Steve McClaren, the Swede's former deputy, was so disastrous that the FA quickly swung back through 180 degrees and went hunting for another foreign expert with a chest-full of medals, paying the highest salary ever pocketed by any international manager in history to a man who could not even match Eriksson's relatively modest achievement at a World Cup.
In an interesting article in Thursday's Financial Times, Simon Kuper, the author of several excellent football books, used statistics to argue that England are getting rid of the most successful manager in their history. But it is misleading to present bald winning percentages as proof of anything unless other factors are taken into account. Capello's 68% of wins in Fifa and Uefa competitions means little without factoring the relative strength of each opposing team and the competitive value of each match into the equation. Nor is it reasonable to accept Steven Gerrard's argument that in South Africa, England's players were exhausted by a long Premier League season. Their lassitude was as much the outcome of Capello's misconceived preparations and the enervating atmosphere created in their Rustenberg camp.
Capello did what he thought was right, according to the lessons learned during a career in which he won titles in Italy and Spain. But he was wrong. When it came to managing an international side, those experiences were meaningless. Success in one sphere does not guarantee similar results in another. What had Aim� Jacquet or Roger Lemerre won before they took France to the World Cup in 1998 or the European Championship two years later? Did a glittering career at the peak of European club competition make Joachim L�w into such an effective head coach for Germany?
Now we are back to choosing an English manager for England, or, perhaps, given the statements in the FA's press conference on Thursday, a British one. Even within that wider definition there are not many suitable candidates, but the experience with Capello certainly means the next man will be required to demonstrate a bit more of that treacherous emotion known as passion, as well as showing an ability to establish a warmer relationship with the players.
Redknapp certainly qualifies on those grounds, which unsettles observers who suspect that the FA is again swinging from one extreme to the other. But the 64-year-old Spurs manager is not really a Ron Knee. His career did not come to a halt at Neasden FC, or, in his case, Bournemouth. He has shown an ability to succeed at several levels of the English game, from the Third Division championship with the Dorset club to the FA Cup with Portsmouth and last season's thrilling ride to the quarter-finals of the Champions League with Tottenham Hotspur. His proven ability to bring the best out of top-class internationals from around the world, currently including the likes of Luka Modric, Rafael van der Vaart and Gareth Bale, suggests that he would have no difficulty dealing with the big names and big egos in the England party.
David Bernstein and his FA colleagues on Thursday spoke of their ambition to create the sort of coaching structure, based at St George's Park in Burton upon Trent, that will ensure a constant supply of home-produced candidates for the job. We have heard such promises before, most notably when McClaren took over from Eriksson, and so far all they have produced is Stuart Pearce, whose five-year stint as Under-21 manager has been inconclusive but who will take charge of the senior team against Holland at the end of this month.
It was Peter Taylor, one of Pearce's predecessors, who gave David Beckham the England captain's armband for the first time in similar circumstances, when put in temporary charge for a match against Italy in November 2000 while the FA awaited Eriksson's arrival ? a successful decision or otherwise, depending on your point of view. Perhaps Pearce, too, can give a helping hand to the man who eventually takes the job on a permanent basis.
But even the most smoothly functioning mechanism does not always produce the required results, as France found when Lemerre and Raymond Domenech, both products of their much?admired coach development system, failed badly in the World Cups of 2002 and 2010. Even the Deutscher Fussball Bund came a cropper, after a succession running from Helmut Sch�n via Franz Beckenbauer to Berti Vogts, with the unfortunate Erich Ribbeck a dozen years ago.
A smooth succession is the ideal, but there are no guarantees, and in football sometimes a decision made on non-statistical evidence can trump a choice based on a flawless CV. Redknapp will never match Capello's collection of trophies, but he could well be a better man for the job.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/feb/09/harry-redknapp-england-fabio-capello-managers
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