Swiss Watch Mens | Stylish Discount Watches | Hot Sale Replica Watches

Scholes will surely never play for England again, but where else can Capello turn?

With the Thames and a thousand memories, most of them concerning a certain Johnny Haynes, meandering by, Craven Cottage is surely one of the more agreeable football venues on earth. However, it was plainly not something worth mentioning to Fabio Capello this last Sunday afternoon.

The Cottage, it is reasonable to assume, was pretty much his version of hell.

What, after all, was there for him, other than the ordeal of being asked tricky questions about the possibilities of Paul Scholes and Mikel Arteta ever playing for what is left of his England team – and the certainty that his answers would come choking back at him in pidgin English yesterday morning.

There was a time – it was when he folded the tents of his camp on the high veldt with considerable grace under pressure – to applaud Capello's decision to fight on in pursuit of some rescue of a brilliant reputation.

Now though, even for his warmest admirers, who saw his ordeal in South Africa as at least partly the result of the collapsed culture of English football, it is difficult not to believe that he really should have cut his losses, taken the financial hit that his carefully amassed fortune could easily have withstood, and nurse his wounds by the shores of Lake Lugano.

This bleak view was surely put into a much sharper perspective by events at the Cottage.

Manchester United started with one English player, Scholes, who can only have increased Capello's well of sadness the other day when he announced that he now regretted his decision to turn down the England manager's desperate call for him to join the World Cup squad. The other Englishman to appear, eventually, for United was Michael Owen, also over 30, but then of course he has been rejected by Capello for some time, on the grounds that with his speed gone – burned off, some would say, by the demands of his first club, Liverpool, roughly eight years ago – he no longer has the needle sharpness that was once his stock-in-trade.

This was on top of the confirmation that came at the Emirates that Capello was indeed existing in the middle of a waking nightmare, when Theo Walcott – the other member of Arsenal's unusually bulging English starting contingent – reproduced all the qualities, albeit against Blackpool's non-existent defence, the coach believed had deserted him in the build-up to the World Cup.

The Arteta story is a joke, excellent player though he is, while the one of Scholes is nothing less than a football tragedy.

Scholes continues to outlive his generation, still offers both his club and his country the best chance of some old-fashioned, coherent creativity in the middle of the field, a fact that Capello was forced to concede when he made the World Cup overture so late.

As Scholes did what he has most always done on Sunday, drive forward with a splendid directness of thought and perfect delivery of the ball to well-placed team-mates, he could only provoke fresh despair over the wasted years which started after the European Championships of 2004. He could no longer stomach Sven-Goran Eriksson's constant re-shaping of the midfield in order to cater for such celebrities as David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, at the cost of someone who knew more about fashioning a team performance than the rest of the candidates put together.

drive from www.independent.co.uk