Lee Dixon: Fabio was given a lesson, but is he willing to learn?

Saturday 03 July 2010 00:00 BST
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There were great expectations of Fabio Capello going into the World Cup and he failed to live up to them. The question is: can he recognise where he went wrong in South Africa and make the necessary changes?

Perhaps the most depressing thing about the footballing lesson that Germany's young side handed out to an England team of vastly more experience last weekend was that after every attack you looked desperately towards the bench for the manager to make a change – and nothing happened.

England stuck rigidly to their two lines of four and the Germans kept running rings around them. Mesut Ozil ripped England to pieces, dragging the centre-halves all over the place and was allowed to keep on doing it for 83 minutes until Joachim Löw took him off with the game well won.

How could a manager with all the experience that Capello has gathered in La Liga and Serie A fail to make that change? That is a worry. It was a seemingly obvious move to make.

But that record he has at club level is second to none, and added to the way in which he guided England to the finals in the first place you can see why the FA have stuck with him (as well as having few really convincing alternatives).

You would expect a coach of his calibre to learn his lessons from South Africa, but then you would also have expected a coach of his calibre to have done something to stop the German onslaught before it was too late.

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