Harry Redknapp's a rare breed now as top English bosses are an endangered species

If the Football Association choose an Englishman as successor to Fabio Capello when his contract expires next summer after Euro 2012, as seems the general preference, they have only two realistic candidates. Harry Redknapp, who is 64 and recovering from minor heart surgery, and Roy Hodgson, who is also 64 and, after a long and itinerant career, has washed up at West Brom after failure at Liverpool.

In truth, there is only one serious English candidate, Redknapp, a brilliant maverick who, for some reason, has not always been trusted by the FA.

That England are producing so few world-class coaches is surely an indictment of the system in which they are nurtured and operate (there are currently only five English Premier League managers).

It's no surprise, then, that Trevor Brooking, the FA's director of football development, has suggested in recent days that Capello's contract might yet be extended if England do well in Poland and Ukraine next summer. Is he serious? He may be when he looks around for homegrown alternatives.

It's impossible to imagine that our culture could produce an English equivalent of Jose Mourinho or Andre Villas-Boas, cerebral, polyglot club managers who have scarcely played the game professionally themselves but who are among the most highly regarded coaches in the world. Or, indeed, an Arsene Wenger or Sven-Goran Eriksson, both of whom as players were essentially little more than mediocre semi-professionals but who dedicated themselves to studying the art and science of coaching.

Mourinho was once asked the secret of his success. His reply was: "I've had more time to study." Like Villas-Boas, Mourinho recognised from an early age that he would not make it as a player. His response to that disappointment was to get an education and to study the latest in business management theory and sports science.

If Villas-Boas were English and spoke about the game as he does, he would have been laughed out of the dressing room at Chelsea, such is the anti-intellectual ethos of English footballers.

Few would disagree that English football culture is resolutely insular and monoglot - at once arrogant and insecure and anxiously deferential to the continental model. Too few of our players have challenged themselves by playing overseas.

Too few of our managers have experience of much beyond the English leagues. For this reason, if not his choice in umbrellas, Steve McClaren should be admired for having worked in Holland, as Bobby Robson did before him, and, albeit briefly, in Germany (the word is that the Wolfsburg players could not understand his Dutch accent).

In early 2007, I sent the Cambridge academic and football enthusiast David Runciman to spend some time with Boothroyd at Watford. Runciman and I had both read and liked Michael Lewis's book Moneyball (2003), which tells the story of how small-time coach Billy Beane transformed the fortunes of baseball club Oakland Athletics through the application of sports science and computer-based statistical analysis of player performances. (The analysis was new then but has since been widely copied.)

We wanted to know if something comparable would be possible in English football, perhaps in the lower leagues rather than in the very top flight where money is the engine of success.

Boothroyd appealed to us because he was serious, intelligent, well-read and progressive, and had studied at Warwick University Business School. He had also read Moneyball (which is now a Hollywood movie starring Brad Pitt as Beane).

Boothroyd was an admirer, too, of Doris Kearns Goodwin's great book about Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals, also a favourite of both Barack Obama and Sir Alex Ferguson.

It did not work out in the end for Boothroyd, who last week was appointed the manager of League Two Northampton, but in the long term should move abroad. He took Watford into the Premier League but found that, without serious money to spend, the Moneyball approach could take him no further. He left Watford in 2008 after they had been relegated.

Boothroyd's early success and subsequent struggles show that imagination and wide-reading can take you only so far in football management.

Something more is required - practical intelligence, instinct, the ability to read character and situations, luck.

Martin O'Neill, a law graduate who played under Brian Clough, has that something extra - and he has just been given the Sunderland job.

The trouble for Brooking and the FA is that he's not English, though they would wish him to be so. For now, it looks like being Redknapp - or, believe it or not, more of Capello.

Still feeling the force of Benn's fight of his life

The 1995 world title bout between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan, which is the subject of an ITV documentary tonight, The Fight Of Their Lives, is the most brutal many of us have ever seen.

Two brave and well-matched boxers - McClellan was rated the best in the world at the time - fought each other, until the American's collapse in the 10th round, with unrelenting ferocity. McClellan was left blinded and crippled by brain injuries sustained in the fight and Benn, the victor, was for years afterwards tormented by regret.

There was wildness in Benn in those days before he became an evangelical preacher. In earlier fights against Chris Eubank and Michael Watson, in a golden era for British boxing, he had hit his opponents with a force that could have brought down a wall. But his all-action, open style left him vulnerable to counter-punching.

Those fights against Watson and Eubank had hurt Benn. Yet he kept climbing back into the ring, being punched hard and punching back even harder, until the night of the fight of his life.

Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman