WORLD CUP 2010: Why are you on the beach, Fabio Capello? Go back to South Africa and learn something!

By Jeff Powell
Updated: 06:24 EDT, 9 July 2010

The Football Association yesterday confirmed that Fabio Capello will still be on holiday this weekend but will not tell us exactly where he is recovering from the nasty shock of being told he must serve two more excruciating years as the manager of England.

That is a pity because I really wanted to ask him what the hell he thinks he's playing at sunning himself on a beach in his grotesque Speedo swimming trunks instead of doing the job for which some Santa Claus of the English game is paying him £6million a year.

If Capello were serious about retrieving our national team from the bottom of the cesspit into which he has just helped it to drop, he would be in Johannesburg on Sunday night watching Holland and Spain contest the World Cup final.

Send him back: Fabio Capello should get off the beach and return to South Africa to learn some valuable lessons

By rights, he should have been in South Africa for the last 10 days or so to study at close quarters the football with which Germany, Holland and, most beautifully of all, Spain are defining a future which is beyond his imagination.

While this is also a game never to be seen in the self-congratulatory Barclays Premier League, it has to be mastered if this country is ever to win the World Cup again.

For Capello to be anywhere else during the quarter-finals, semi-finals and the final itself is nothing less than dereliction of duty.

Watching on television is not the same. The tactical sweep of the game, the off-the-ball movement and the intensity of the physical challenge are among the vital elements obscured by the box.

Nor can he engage through his widescreen TV in the stimulating dialogue with the assembled host of great football men who are looking on as the game - as it always does - evolves during the World Cup.

How it's done, Fab: Spain and Holland deserve to be contesting this Sunday's final, with one being crowned world champions for the first time

By joining his men on the retreat from Bloemfontein, Capello deserted his post. For that it is arguable he could be dismissed without one penny in compensation - never mind £12m - if the FA had the sense to do so. Of course, miserably, they don't.

Having botched the extension of Capello's absurdly generous contract, they will lose too much face unless they lumber on with a manager who did not know his best goalkeeper from a hole in the ground, who deluded himself and his cheerleaders that he could win a World Cup with old men and invalids - and whose style of football is as antiquated as the catacombs beneath the cobbled streets of Rome.

Nor is he about to change. Not at 64 and having come out of semi-retirement to pick up a pension which could even bring tears to the eyes of our public sector workers.

Paid the price: Dunga was sacked for masterminding Brazil's failure in South Africa

For Don Fabio himself, I suspect the worst thing that has happened this summer is being kept on rather than paid off. Managers know when they have lost the dressing room but he is obliged to keep going through the motions... dragging this country behind him.

Managers who went further or produced better teams than England have either fallen on their swords or been sacked - the bosses of Brazil (Dunga), Mexico (Javier Aguirre), Paraguay (Gerardo Martino), South Korea (Huh Jung-moo) and Japan (Takeshi Okada) among them - with others as notable as Argentina's Diego Maradona and Carlos Alberto Parreira of South Africa soon to follow them.

Capello - in the idiom of the smutty Carry On farces which somewhat older readers will remember - is having a laugh.

Unfortunately the joke is on us while he relaxes on some five-star beach.

Exactly what we should have expected with the match-night temperatures in Soccer City closer to zero than Speedo.