James Lawton: Capello's vision blurred by spectre of Beckham

If England were flattered by their 5-1 victory over 131st-ranked Kazakhstan, as undoubtedly they were, their coach, Fabio Capello, still managed to give a little more weight to a heady belief. It is that he is capable not only of successfully rejigging his team on the run but also possibly changing the course of decades of going nowhere.

However, should he indeed change the history of the English national team, even his warmest admirers will have to concede that in the margins of his effort he was also the author of at least one serious case of its distortion.

By handing David Beckham yet another cameo role at the end of a game that had already been resolved by a combination of tactical adjustment and the exhaustion of opponents who for well over an hour had punched well beyond their weight, Capello brought the former captain alongside Sir Bobby Charlton on 106 caps.

Presumably, he will now usher a player who has consigned himself to the football wasteland of America, and slipped, irrevocably surely, out of serious contention for a starting position, past the 108-cap milestone of the late Bobby Moore.

He will do it, no doubt, with the approval of what might laughably be described as the football "cognoscenti" of Wembley who, after relentlessly jeering Ashley Cole for an admittedly crass mistake, saved their biggest cheer of the day for Beckham's statistically momentous arrival.

Yes, it was momentous when you considered the circumstances of Charlton's final appearance for England and those that accompanied Beckham's latest place in the annals of the game.

Charlton, already a World Cup winner and his country's record goal-scorer, was withdrawn after a performance of subtlety and poise that had substantially helped England to a 2-0 lead over West Germany in the 1970 World Cup quarter-final on a day of merciless heat in Leon. The England manager, Sir Alf Ramsey, believed he was saving Charlton for a semi-final against Italy, but the lead had been reduced moments before the player left the field and momentum was lost.

Ramsey later conceded on the flight home from Mexico that he had made a grievous mistake and apologised to Charlton even as he thanked him for his services – and made it clear that because of his age, which at 32 was a year younger than Beckham today, he had indeed played his last game for his country. Yet caps no weightier than confetti continue to accumulate against Beckham's name.

None of this is perhaps hugely relevant to Capello's serious challenge of returning England to the authority they displayed in Zagreb last month in the 4-1 win over Croatia before they meet Belarus, a team rated 72 places above gallant Kazakhstan. However, this religious deference to the founder member of the desperately over-touted "golden generation" has to be an unwelcome reminder of those recent days when England resembled more an old boys' club than a properly assembled fighting unit.

There is also the quite important matter of attempting to preserve what is left of the integrity of an England cap. It was battered beyond reason in the days of Sven Goran Eriksson and if Capello has at times brilliantly asserted his belief that playing for your country brings with it strenuous demands on a player's character, fitness and performance, the Beckham circus routine represents at the very least a breakdown in such rigour.

What also needs saying, even at this late hour, is that whatever Capello (below) achieves – and there is reason enough to believe at this point that it will be considerable – is that along the way he made a nonsense of the roll call of great achievement. Who cares? It was clear enough that not too many did at Wembley, and nor will they when, as seems certain, Beckham's caps pile as high, if not higher, as those of Moore, whose statue is supposed to remind patrons of some ultimate value in playing for England and delivering the ultimate success.

Despite the poverty of so much of England's performance, the Beckham issue inevitably jars against the continuing impression that the coach is, as you would expect from his record, not a man willing to hide behind the platitudes that have so often in the past sought to disguise dire underperformance.

Eriksson was a man who could conjure a positive flicker in any kind of debacle. Steve McClaren agreed with Rio Ferdinand that the result and not the performance was the important thing, even against opposition without a breath of the passion and decent ball skills displayed on Saturday by those such as Tanat Nusserbayev, Sergei Skorykh and Ruslan Baltiyev before their fires burned low.

Capello conceded, with some fine English understatement, that he was not happy at half time. Wayne Rooney, peripheral on the left in a first half which failed to produce one shot on goal, was ordered to work closer to Emile Heskey, an adjustment which had huge effect, and Shaun Wright-Phillips replaced the perennially solid Gareth Barry in pursuit of width.

This worked against a drained Kazakhstan. It carries no guarantees in Minsk, a point that was quite scarily underlined when Kazakhstan poured at England so menacingly in the absence of Barry.

It means that once again an England coach has to address the issue of Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard – and with the disturbing implication that even a football man as sophisticated as Capello is powerless to make two talented halves into a passably effective whole.

The problem can rarely have been so haunting as when Gerrard floated a sublime cross-field pass to the very feet of Cole. Here, surely, was the means to brush aside game but overmatched opponents. But it wasn't. Gerrard and Lampard spent quite a lot of time, particularly in the first half, announcing the fact that they were aware each other existed. Once they even played a pretty one-two. But, yet again, it didn't amount to anything of significance. Gerrard became frantic in his search for influence and it has to be said that Lampard, who flourished in the Liverpool man's absence in Zagreb, appeared the more comfortable in his ambition – and his own skin.

Capello was a little defensive. No, they didn't take up the right positions in the early going but they got better. He made it sound like a work in progress but at what point will he decide the cost overrun is likely to prove too heavy?

The time can not be too far away in the absence of that authority and bite which is so regularly displayed on behalf of Liverpool and Chelsea and which would have transformed hugely the limply ineffectual sparring of the first half. No doubt a decision to jettison either player would be one of the hardest of Capello's regime. But it is by such strokes that a winning coach sometimes announces himself. It is a statement that he is captive to no reputation, no tide of collective enthusiasm for talent which, for one reason or another, fails to strengthen his team.

Almost everything we know about Capello says that he is capable of such a gesture in Minsk this week. Everything, that is, apart from his strange but popular indulgence of David Beckham. In this respect we are not just talking about the window dressing of history. We are talking about the force of will that makes the real thing.

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