Capello will wait until May to decide Rooney's Euro 2012 fate
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Your support makes all the difference.Fabio Capello has told advisers that he will wait until next May before making a decision on whether to take Wayne Rooney to Euro 2012, with the Football Association as yet unable to make a decision on whether to appeal against his three-match ban from Uefa.
Capello believes that the governing body should appeal. But in the event that it is unsuccessful, or ends with Uefa increasing Rooney's ban, the England manager is keeping his options open on whether he will even take the player to Poland.
The immediate decision that faces the FA is whether to pursue an appeal case for Rooney, although having clarified the rules with Uefa yesterday they now know that in doing so they could risk a bigger punishment.
Rooney's case is not a priority for Uefa, which is dealing with those disciplinary issues that could have an impact on the teams competing in the play-offs for Euro 2012 next month. As a result, the FA does not expect to receive the "written reasons" for Rooney's punishment until the start of next week.
On receipt of that more detailed legal argument, the FA has three days in which to tell Uefa whether it wants to appeal and a further six days to submit the documentation. It means the process is not expected to be resolved until the beginning of the week after next, at the earliest.
The FA rebuffed accusations that it is guilty of double-standards as a three-match ban would be standard for violent conduct in the English domestic game. The FA has a fixed tariff for offences while Uefa does not.
There were mixed feelings among Premier League managers yesterday as to whether Rooney's Uefa ban was too harsh. The striker's former manager at Everton, David Moyes, said the three-game ban was a "joke".
Moyes said: "It might be better to leave the boy at home and get a good summer. I'm a Scotsman, so I hope he stays at home."
The Tottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp, the man widely expected to be Capello's successor, said it was "a painful, painful lesson for Rooney that he cannot do things like that". He added: "I have sympathy for him but those are the rules."
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