Tonight:
4°c
With each England victory, the theories about what makes Fabio Capello such a successful coach become more interesting. According to an entertaining column by my old friend Roger Alton, editor of The Independent, Capello's "businesslike 1960s Marxist lecturer's thick black" rim spectacles provide authority. "Capello is the real thing: look no further than those specs."
For Simon Kuper, writing in the Financial Times, part of Capello's success can be attributed to his inability to speak good English. "It limits his opportunities for communicating with tabloids," he writes.
Continuing this theme, I've often thought that Capello's thick, dark, well-groomed hair must help to provide an aura of sophistication in a dressing room of young, body-conscious style icons. He just wouldn't be Capello if he was bald or grey. In fact, for a man of 63, his hair is luxuriant; he's a kind of Melvyn Bragg of football.
Yet, not so long ago, I and many others thought the appointment of Capello signified a final surrender by the Football Association, definitive acceptance that, after the debacle of Steve McClaren, the England team could not be coached by an Englishman. At the time of his appointment, Capello could speak no more than a few sentences in English - at least in public, at press conferences when he should have been communicating his urgent vision for renewal.
Listening to Capello at his first press conference, wrote Martin Samuel in The Times, the nature of the surrender was unequivocal. "The appointment made by Brian Barwick, chief executive of the FA, was not a victory after all, not the triumph it had been painted, but a terrible, hollow defeat. England lost, Italy won - again. Lost the way, lost the plot, lost all knowledge of what had been invented within these shores, with no clue how to get it back." Now England are on their way to the World Cup finals in South Africa, with a disciplined team and with Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard working in harmony. But England teams have qualified impressively for major tournaments in the recent past, only to fail when it mattered most, in the usual traumatic circumstances: botched penalty shoot-outs and star players sent off.
Like Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger or Guus Hiddink, Capello knows who he is, exactly what he wants and how to go about getting it, both on and off the pitch. As soon as the England job became available, he let it be known that he was interested.
"It would be a beautiful challenge," he said, of a position that is the highest-paid of its kind in the world.
Like Sven-Goran Eriksson before him, Capello is worldly. Like Sven, he has a hinterland: the Swede liked opera and Tibetan poetry, the Italian likes opera and fine art. Both men chased the money - and why not?
But Sven, on his way to becoming a figure of fun, was also chasing secretaries and TV celebrities while no hand of Capello has strayed on to an FA secretary's leg at a Christmas party. Nor have his hand-made shoes been left outside one of Ulrika's bedrooms.
For now, the Italian in the Marxist specs is master of all he surveys. But the defining test for him will come next summer in South Africa when - let us imagine - England, through to the quarter-finals, come up against an exceptional passing side, such as Spain, Brazil or Italy. Only then will we know whether England's best under Capello is good enough for the rest of us.
Tories won't rush to play the football game like Blair's team
The emergence of the Premier League as world football's most glamorous, profitable and admired occurred during the high point of the New Labour years.
The rise of New Labour was coterminous with the rise of the New Football.
“The Premier League was held up by Tony Blair as a modernisation model for the rest of British industry to follow,” says John Williams of Leicester University's football unit.
“It's a bust to boom economic, global entertainment miracle.”
The architects of New Labour — Blair, Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell — were football fans. Sir Alex Ferguson, a close friend of Campbell's, is a robust Labour man.
Blair and Brown once invited the cameras into Downing Street while they were drinking beers and watching a game during a football tournament.
Look at us, was the message, we're just regular guys! Blair was filmed playing head tennis with Kevin Keegan.
More recently, David Beckham was strategically filmed by the BBC as he left Downing Street after a late night audience with Gordon Brown. And Rio Ferdinand went in to Number 10 to interview the Prime Minister for a sports magazine.
Labour understood the allure of football and, when the party had better control of their media operations, wanted to be associated with it.
Now the country is facing a change of government but it is unlikely that David Cameron and his mostly patrician front bench will rush to embrace the people's game in quite the same way as Labour.
So which sports, or sporting events, will find favour under the Tories? The Eton wall game? Fives? The Henley Regatta? National Hunt racing?
I'll be monitoring this one closely in the months ahead.
Reason to be cheerful…
The seven-match one-day series with the Aussies has proved to be a dismal coda to the Ashes triumph. The only joy is that this wretched, tedious, cynical and overlong non-event will soon be at an end.
