Soccer: Capello back in favour for now

Note to doubters everywhere: for "buffoon" and "monster" please reinstate "genius" and "god".

And replace jackass photomontage with wise old fox. At least until Wednesday morning when England's soccer team play Switzerland in Basle.

Fabio Capello, the soccer manager with the biography subtitled "Portrait of a Winner", is back in favour - until the next time England suffer a less convincing result than Saturday's ultimately comfortable 4-0 win over Bulgaria. Then the name-calling can begin all over again.

Dealing with injuries and unavailabilities, Capello came up with a formula and used his experience to good effect. He was even able to explain more lucidly than usual the key to it all, which was Wayne Rooney's role.

"Rooney's movement was always free, but this time I asked him to come back more," he explained. "Play in the hole with [James] Milner left and Theo [Walcott] right. It was a good position.

"But it depends on which style opponents play. If they play one man in front of the back four, it's not so easy."

The point being that Bulgaria's two centre-halves were never sure whether either of them should move out and cover Rooney when he dropped a little deeper than Defoe, or rely on a midfielder to pick him up.

A clever player in the Rooney role can flit into the space between the opposition's backline and midfield and make use of it to good effect. That he clearly did, contributing to all four goals with his passes for first Ashley Cole, then Jermain Defoe and Adam Johnson. It is the ideal place for him, allowing him to employ that vision and be much more involved in the game.

Defoe, who was playing only because of injury to Bobby Zamora, finished the match with a well-taken hat-trick.

Capello made an important point in noting that Rooney would almost certainly find the going tougher against a team that fields at least one defensive midfielder assigned to fill the hole in front of the back four, or even to man-mark him, which if performed with sufficient vigour, legal or otherwise, can often send Wayne's world dangerously close to boiling point.

The one thing still lacking for him, as it was until converting a penalty against West Ham last weekend, is a goal, and Wednesday morning in Basle would be an ideal time to find one.

It would be perverse not to send England out in the same formation.

- INDEPENDENT