Capello and captain get stuck in time warp

The great thing about being David Beckham is that no matter what he discards or loses in the course of his career, there is always someone – usually a famous international manager – waiting to give it back to him. On Saturday, Fabio Capello made official what had been suspected for the previous 18 hours or so – that Beckham was to captain England again just 23 months after he tearfully told us that he did not want the job any longer. Like a man who has just had his wallet returned to him after dropping it in a dubious part of town, Beckham must have wondered how much luck he had left to use up.

This was more than luck, this was extraordinary. This is a man who had resigned the England captaincy two years ago and did so without first bothering to tell the then new manager Steve McClaren. The first man ever to quit on his stool as England captain. And he was being invited to have another go. When Beckham resigned on 2 July 2006 in Baden Baden the question was whether he even had the right to quit. Surely that kind of decision was for whoever bestowed the captaincy rather than the man who occupied it? Beckham is the man for whom forgiveness is never-ending.

You have to wonder how much a resignation in public life counts for these days. How about asking Tony Blair if perhaps he wouldn't mind letting bygones be bygones and having another crack at being Prime Minister? Better yet, he could bring Peter Mandelson back into the cabinet as well. After all, he only resigned the two times.

The question is: what is Capello playing at? The received wisdom is that he has already made his decision – from Steven Gerrard, Rio Ferdinand and John Terry – on who should be his long-term captain (the new man will be in place for the Czech Republic friendly on 20 August). If he was to pick Gerrard or Ferdinand (Terry was not in the squad) to have captained the team last night then the assumption would have been that they had got the job permanently. Pick another player, like Gareth Barry for example, and the mistaken assumption would have been that the poor bloke even had a chance.

In order to cover his decision on Saturday, Capello maintained that Beckham was a serious contender for the long-term job although no one really believes him. Especially as when he was asked if he seriously believed Beckham would still be competitive aged 35 at the 2010 World Cup, the Italian simply said that he did not know. There is a lingering possibility that last night might just have been Beckham's last game as an England footballer and, in a break from his usual lack of sentiment, Capello decided that, for cap 102, the old boy could be captain one more time.

Most likely is that he gave Beckham the job because someone had to do it against Trinidad & Tobago last night and as it was a game played for entirely political reasons – to win T&T football federation president Jack Warner's Fifa vote for the 2018 World Cup – why not put the tin hat on a daft few days and give Goldenballs the armband? The Trinidadians love him so much that they demanded his presence at a kids coaching clinic on Friday night – also a great bit of publicity for Warner – that Beckham had not originally been chosen to attend.

It would be a shame if Capello felt the need to bow to the FA in this great 2018 vote-winning extravaganza. From everything Capello has said over the last six days, it seems his season finished with the win over the United States on Wednesday. The rest of it – this friendly in the Caribbean – has been little more than a pointless bit of time-serving. On Saturday he gave a press conference in which he said that he was not interested in "PR in football" but that the FA might be. At that point the FA spokesman interrupted to put his organisation's side of the story.

Beckham's presence in the England team, captain or not, is indicative of the wider problems of this side. The problem that says no young generation is breaking through to replace Beckham or even the likes of Frank Lampard, Michael Owen, David James, Ashley Cole, Gerrard or Terry. They are the golden generation that just keeps going on and on because, even for a pragmatist such as Capello, there is no other option. The great surge of new talent that we awaited after the failure of 2006 has not arrived unless you count Micah Richards at right-back – and that is hardly a revolution.

So it goes on and on. The midfield on Wednesday - Beckham, Owen Hargreaves, Lampard and Gerrard – was like a Sven Goran Eriksson tribute night. The England team is stuck in its 2004 time warp and the elevation of Beckham back to the captaincy is hardly a sign that it is about to move forward any time soon.

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