Heated arguments about whether or not Fabio Capello should have been kept in place as England manager amount to little more than a sideshow within the grand, theatrically sustained delusion that England can be considered a major power in international football.
The nation’s record in the two defining competitions at that level, the World Cup and the European championship, would be grossly flattered if described as moderate.
It has, aside from a handful of years under Alf Ramsey half a long lifetime ago, generally been a buffer of ugly reality into which the population’s inexhaustible capacity for optimistic fantasising has repeatedly crashed.
So, whatever the chagrin occasioned by the retention of Capello after a campaign in South Africa whose sequence of abysmally inadequate performances culminated