Big Story
England manager John Terry announced Aaron Lennon had “played his way into the World Cup squad” with his display in England’s destruction of Croatia yesterday, one that — of course — has the English press in a frenzy. But, please, can we not call Lennon “Azza”?  Thanks.

Of course, there are plenty of plaudits for the actual England manager, Fabio Capello, who now faces nine months of managing expectations that will presumably rise to include Frank Lampard curing cancer on the way up to lifting the World Cup trophy in Johannesburg next year.

Paul Hayward gives a much-needed touch of wariness to the celebration, pointing out that England’s group contained “Andorra, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine and a Croatia side unravelling so fast that a nought may have to be added to their No9 ranking in Fifa’s global list.”

Still, all England fans will enjoy scouting the Guardian’s interactive map of World Cup 2010. And finally, Steve McClaren’s umbrella seems like ancient history.

Worldwide

• Failure elsewhere is of course on the agenda for the national associations of countries who will only be vacationing in South Africa next year. Poland waited merely minutes to fire Leo Beenhakker — even though technically, Poland could still qualify (Polish football’s chief Grzegorz Lato: “I don’t want to make a rash decision but this cannot be changed. That was Leo’s last game as coach”). The Scottish FA, meanwhile, are typically hedging their bets for now after their elimination (Scottish FA chief Gordon Smith: “unlike many people who are quick to offer a knee-jerk reactive opinion, I feel that this a time for measured and considered reflection on the campaign that has just been completed”).
• Not surprisingly, 87% of Argentinians want Diego Maradona to resign after last night’s 1-0 defeat to Paraguay. As Marcela Mora y Araujo points out, that won’t solve all the problems (given Argentina were already struggling when Maradona took over), but perhaps more difficult is identifying exactly what all the problems are. It’s obviously not a shortage of good players.
• In the CONCACAF region, the U.S. and Mexico made heavy weather of beating Trinidad & Tobago and Honduras respectively, but they both moved considerably closer to automatic qualification. Costa Rica’s disappointing form, as they fell 1-0 to El Salvador, will be some solace for Argentina, as they are now the likely playoff opponents if Diego’s boys do continue their current struggles.
• In today’s installments on the ongoing “poaching saga” in the Premier League, the war of words between Manchester City’s Garry Cook and Ken Bates heats up (it’s hard to think of two men with fewer legs to stand on when debating moral issues in football). Meanwhile, Alex Ferguson says Manchester United have behaved impeccably and that it would be “crazy” for the club to pay parents.
• A writer for EPL Talk got to play FIFA ’10, and it sounds good enough that it might waste even more of our time than FIFA ’09.
• Australia’s Adelaide United have a new sponsor: global behemoth “Jim’s Plumbing”.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

So here we are. I couldn’t find any published material comparing Capello to Cesare Borgia, but it’s not hard to see that England fans and the English-speaking media are turning to a particular sort of metaphor in order to conceptualize Capello’s term as manager of the England team. Capello as mob boss (“Don Fabio”), Capello as fascist dictator, Capello as Roman emperor: there’s a particular image in anglophone popular culture of a merciless, murderous, rapacious and intimidating style of Italian masculinity, and it’s in this image that Capello’s English tenure is being portrayed.

What’s odd—or perhaps not so odd, when you think about it—is that the tenor of the portrayal so far has been overwhelmingly positive. Capello is being described as a tyrant and a killer, but it would appear that he’s a tyrant and a killer in a good way. “No false Dons this time with Godfather Capello in charge,” ran one headline yesterday morning. “Capello Lays Down the Law,” was the headline on Football365. Best of all, from today’s Sun: “Fabio Capello gave England’s superstars the first taste of his iron fist last night.” If only the Ides of March weren’t coming up, they might have asked him for more.

There’s a fascinating process at work here, because what seems to be happening is that Capello’s foreignness—which was initially a subject of anxiety for a large segment of England supporters—is being run through a particular popular-culture filter that recasts it as an expression of English strength. It isn’t the real Julius Caesar, after all, to whom Capello is being compared, or the real mafia don. It’s the movie version of each, the figure through whom we’re able to indulge power fantasies and a dream of dominance without real-life moral consequences. None of these figures is foreign, really. Collectively they represent a kind of mythic caricature, rooted tightly in our own cultures, of the strong leader, the boss, the man no one dares to talk back to, the man who doesn’t care how you feel.

After England crashed out of their Euro 2008 qualifying campaign in November, there was a deep need among England supporters to see the players put in their place. This was both a strategic priority (because spoiled, pampered players whose wives travel everywhere with them aren’t strong enough to win major tournaments) and a psychological need (because spoiled, pampered players who lose tournaments are an object of contempt). When Capello arrived with his disciplinarian reputation, and then again when he acted to drop superstars from the team and set some rules to govern the other players, he tapped into a collective need to see the players punished, whether to shape them up for subsequent competition or simply to strike a punitive blow for their previous underachievement.

Capello’s role was a combination of both forms of discipline, and the speed with which the media and the fans began to see him through mafia imagery and icons from imperial Rome suggests how broadly and deeply that was felt. Capello would be the man who would hold no player in awe, who would insist on hard work and commitment; he would be the figure whom the players would have to fear. He would restore English values, in other words, to an England squad that no longer represented them.

Not only in the tone, then, but also in the concrete imagery in which Capello has been welcomed to England, there’s a kind of embalmed hostility toward the players that will be difficult to erase. Yesterday’s 2-1 win over Switzerland in Capello’s first match in charge may begin the process. But we may not have a definite sign that England have forgiven their team until they look for a different way to approve of their manager.

Brian Phillips makes the trains run on time at The Run of Play.

Photo credit: wallyg

Italian reaction to the appointment has been largely very positive: it is seen as a great feather in the cap of Italian football that England, still respected here as the home of the game, has turned to an Italian. (Whether the appointment of Sven Goran-Eriksson was a similar compliment to Swedish football is, however, another thing altogether; I somehow suspect that was also seen rather as a mark of the importance of Serie A).

And it’s not just about the appointment of an Italian manager to a foreign national side: it’s specifically England-related. While the actual style of play in England (and in the national side in particular) are often derided as wholly lacking in skill, nous, tactics or sophistication, the mystique of England and of the game’s origins remains considerable here. The history and tradition of the English game are respected and mildly envied; English attendance figures are cited with awe and astonishment; the historic stadiums are especially admired. Italians wax lyrical about the magic of Wembley as though they were auditioning for a job commentating on the FA Cup for ITV. The idea that England, home of football, has turned to an Italian, is major news indeed.

Now as any observer of the circus that is Italian football knows, the need to fill three major national sports dailies, as well as a host of lesser publications, means that there is a lot of coverage of a lot of non-stories. It is no coincidence that Italy is the spiritual home of transfer gossip: why, the calciomercato can be good for easily half the paper on a slow news day. Add to that daily half hour TV shows, and often more than 5 hours of programming on a Sunday, from Rai and Mediaset both, and factor in Sky Sports, and you will see how much time and space there is to fill.

So once the basics of the story have been covered, what else is there to say about the appointment? The UK media have followed their traditional path of trying to dig up scandal – your correspondent has received more than one email from UK types asking if I had any dirt I could dish – and “human interest” stories. Well, the dirt isn’t all that dirty – he’s not a fascist, sorry lads, just a small ‘c’ conservative and devout Catholic – and I’m not sure that Capello actually fulfils all the fundamental requirements of a human interest story, be he never so interesting. And of course that’s all old news over here.

Instead the Italian media has been slaverishly following… the UK media coverage. And this too is relatively traditional: Italians love to see (and moan about) how they are presented abroad. English fans delighted by appointment of Capello! English fans horrified by appointment of Capello! English fans impressed by Capello’s achievements in Italy! English fans hostile to Italian style of play! Continue until page 35. In particular, the tabloids are a source of endless fascination to the Italian press. There is, I think, a slight sense of anticipatory schadenfreude about the savaging which “i famosi tabloid britannici” are expected to dish out, at some stage, to a man for whom many Italian journalists would adore to do a tabloid-esque hatchet job but will never have the chance.

Much reported and repeated was Max Clifford’s column for the Times in which he gave Capello some largely tongue in cheek suggestions as to how best to manage the press, the public, and his PR. These included “Don’t read the papers” and “Keep a low profile” along with – to the amusement and delight of the watching Italian media – “Be yourself”. This is surely one of the most redundant pieces of advice offered since the beginning of recorded history. “The English are perhaps a little naïve if they think they need to tell Capello to be himself,” was the most moderate of assessments of this remark.

Meanwhile the front page of the Gazzetta dello Sport offers a whole section of reporting not only on Capello’s English adventure, but on UK reporting thereupon. You can, for instance, see their gallery of tabloid front page reactions to the appointment; read the latest daily round-up of UK press comment; and find links to no fewer than fifteen other stories about the media reaction. Comments on the actual appointment are relatively sparse and mostly boil down to: it’s a shitty job, and he’ll have his work cut out, but if anyone can do it, Fabio can. Which is not so very different from the UK reaction, come to think of it.

Now, I am not immune to the irony of this post, as a UK national, commenting on the Italian media commenting on the UK media… if an Italian friend would like to comment somewhere else on my thoughts here, in a short while we might be able to get the whole world to collapse in on itself in a self-reflexive implosion.

Nonetheless it’s been an interesting week here in this regard. The obsessive tracking of English reaction, the continual disparagement of the English team and of the available English coaches, the ceaseless assertion that this serves as an acknowledgement of, and tribute to, Italian football, seems to me indicative in fact of a considerable national anxiety. After four World Cups, why on earth would the Italians need to boast about the appointment of Capello? I mean, “better than Steve McClaren” is not the most flattering of epithets… it’s hardly synonymous with “all-time great of the game” is it? This day by day coverage reads to me like a desperate quest for approval. The pupil may have long outgrown the master, but for Italy, football remains fundamentally Made in England.

Tabloid hacks can pursue Vanda for more Italian gossip at Spangly Princess.

Photo credits: realistar; Dayorama; danielegaliffa | mentegrafica.it; Pensiero

It’s a day for opinions, and here’s mine: I think this Capello fellow is going to be an interesting choice for England. England, right now, are like a team that woke up in a hospital bed with a headache and a strange family sobbing beside them. They don’t seem to know who they are. They’re missing their identity. And Capello seems like a stubborn enough ego (unlike Steve McClaren, who was basically a slice of cheese ready to melt on the sandwich of anyone who approached him with a camera) to have an actual chance of giving them a new one.

Giving a team a personality is one of the least-well-defined skills in football management. You can talk about melding individual talents into a coherent whole, but most of the time talking about melding is just a distracting way to promise that you don’t know what you mean. It’s hard to talk about giving a team an identity because what’s an identity for a team? You know one when you see it—Italy has one; Switzerland doesn’t, quite—and you know it has to do with a team meaning something, so that when you think about the team, some distinct connotation arises in your mind, over and above personnel or kit colors or tactics. But how the connotation gets there is to some extent a mystery.

Teams don’t always need strong personalities in order to succeed—France won every trophy under the sun without one, no matter how hard people tried to extrapolate one from the essentially characterless Zidane—but the greatest teams all have them, and there’s something about the culture of football in England that suggests that, until the team gets one, the drinking subset of their fans is going to go on viewing the world through a hard red prism of utterly pointless rage.

Anyway, in a spirit of encouragement, I’ve put together a list of five managers whose appointments brought a strong new personality to their teams. It’s not that they’re the greatest managers of all time, or the most tactically innovative, though there are some of each on the list. But they all were able to impart a distinct identity to their sides, often one that sharply contrasted with what was there before. Whether Capello joins them or not will be fascinating to see.

Gusztáv Sebes — Hungary (1949). He took over a team that was best known for slowly trundling up the pitch and kicking a ball into the side of a haystack and transformed them into the most dynamic squad in Europe. Under Sebes, the famous Aranycsapat, the “Golden Team”—featuring the fearsome Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis, and the great Nándor Hidegkuti—developed an identity based on speed, movement, and fluidity, one which revolved around an attacking 4-2-4 formation and the innovative use of a withdrawn striker. What Sebes called their “socialist football” style anticipated Total Football by decades in requiring players to rotate among different positions. They achieved a still-unmatched 32-game unbeaten streak, scored six goals against England at Wembley, and remain the greatest team ever to be cheated out of the 1954 World Cup.

Bill Shankly — Liverpool (1959). The obvious choice, but he couldn’t be left off the list. Shankly changed everything that could be changed about Liverpool while somehow preserving a sense of the club’s innate identity. Liverpool were still Liverpool, but somehow, under Shankly, that no longer meant they were terrible.

Helenio Herrera — Inter Milan (1960). Inter were hardly strangers to winning when Herrera took over—they were only nine years removed from their last title in Serie A, which was their seventh overall—but under his reign, they became the center of the catenaccio revolution that transformed, not only Inter, but all of Italian football. Suddenly, the word “Inter” meant a towering libero, a clinical counterattack, and a stifling 1-0 win. If you listen to people who lived through it, it would be 25 years before an Italian club scored a second goal in a match.

Rinus Michels — Ajax (1965). The seeds of Total Football were planted at Ajax by Jack Reynolds and developed invisibly for years, but it was Michels’s arrival as manager that reversed the decline of the Spurgeon/Gruber/Rowley years and brought the revolution into flower. Suddenly Ajax were not only moving in an interesting way on the pitch, they were moving in an interesting way and scoring three goals in the first fifteen minutes. Michels’s disciplinarian demeanor (he was nicknamed “The General”) never quite matched the liberated grace with which his teams played on the pitch, but one way or another he created the conditions that they needed to succeed. We can thank his Ajax team not only for the brilliance of Johan Cruyff and the perfection of the offside trap, but also for developments in football that are still taking place today—witness the number of Ajax-connected managers, administrators and players involved at high levels in top clubs throughout Europe.

Arsène Wenger — Arsenal (1996). How much more completely can you change the personality of a club? All the way through the George Graham/Bruce Rioch years, “boring, boring Arsenal” played in a style that seemed to have a walrus mustache and be deathly afraid of crying. It was just the thing for an elephant hunt, but for beautiful football, not quite. Then Wenger arrived, and ever since they’ve been writing florid symphonies. The mechanical back lines and windy hoofs upfield have been replaced by intricate passing and movement so mathematically pure that I think they may have established a Unified Field Theory once in a 4-0 win against Millwall. Their old identity seems like a prehistoric relic. Arsenal, dull? I doubt an eleven-year-old fan could even be made to believe it.

This isn’t a complete list, obviously, just a few names that came to mind, and I’d love to hear more suggestions. Which managers have most dramatically changed the character of a team or the culture around it? What do you think: which managers should Capello be looking to emulate?

Brian Phillips is keeping the seat warm for the next man at The Run of Play.

Photo credits: Paul…//Thurston; Corx; petecarr; murray_fortescue