James Lawton: Let's hope Capello can bring a roar from Rooney the quiet lion

Fabio Capello, Il Capo, per favore, take us away, at least for a few days, from all that afflicts our old love of football.

Take us away from an English club game which, while not convicted of the kind of institutionalised corruption you left behind in Italy, is still pretty much rotten to the core. Rotten, certainly, in how it treats so many of its people, and in the way it has made money, from wherever it comes, so much the ruling factor in who wins and who loses.

There is maybe a limit to what you can achieve against the abrasive pub footballers of Andorra and a Croatia who, despite being exposed as less than first rank in the recent European Championship, still have formidable advantages at home in Zagreb against the team you inherited on such a low after they had twice been dismantled by these skilful, well-organised opponents, and shown up for all their played-out assumptions of superiority over the years of numbing under-achievement and catastrophic leadership.

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Yes, it is also true that you have not yet illuminated the sky over the new Wembley and some of us find it hard to forgive your indulgence of the superannuated ambitions of the celebrity footballer David Beckham.

However, it would have been unrealistic to expect you quite so soon to peel off the kind of masterpiece which helped to make your reputation when your Milan played Johan Cruyff's Barcelona off the field in the European Cup final of 1994 in Athens, winning 4-0 and producing quite beautiful football.

You are, after all, being paid £6m a year not so much to make a team as to recover an abandoned culture, and these things take a little time, especially when, in the wake of a second thrashing by Croatia, Michael Owen, so recently a glory of the team, allowed the assertion to be made under his name in a serious newspaper that not one of the victors could have expected to be included in the team they had so comprehensively outplayed to the point of humiliation.

Such thinking, buoyed by the mealy-mouthed Sven Goran Eriksson and Steve McClaren, has plainly been your first target and now, with the arrival of competitive football, maybe, just maybe, we will begin to see some results.

Of course you have not exactly been short of advice, especially on such tactical nuances involved in the possibility of getting people like Steven Gerrard, unfortunately absent when the requirement is not a waterfall of platitudes but some seriously effective football in an England shirt, and Frank Lampard to play remotely as well for their country as they sometimes do for their clubs.

Speaking strictly for oneself, of course, it seems reasonable to believe that, with nine scudettos as a player and coach, and two Spanish league titles on top of one of the great European Cup final performances, you may just be able to handle the tactics thrown up by the promising but still tiro coach Slaven Bilic.

The deeper hope here, certainly, is that you have made some inroads into what England footballers might just now expect of themselves when they wear the shirt that so recently was handed around as though it was a training bib.

You caused quite a few raised eyebrows when you picked out the B-list Premier League veteran performer Jimmy Bullard, but wasn't that something to be bracketed with your insistence that England players dress like professional representatives of their nation and not some laddish band on their way to making whoopee in Las Vegas and that there were certain other new requirements, like punctuality at mealtimes and a clearing out of the agents who used to mill around the team hotel?

Basic commands, indeed, but all aimed at instilling the revolutionary belief that playing for your country was not a right but a privilege and that if someone like Bullard was not a natural choice, he might have some elements in his nature that would help to make a real team and not a parade of poseurs.

Elements like guts and an understanding that it doesn't matter how many gifts you have been given, there is still a need to play as far out of your skin as is possible.

We know that you have been dismayed by the gap between Wayne Rooney's talent and his ability to deliver at the international level; that the lion of the training field can become such a fractious little lamb when it matters most; and we can only hope that sooner rather than later you can draw from him the kind of performance that came when you first saw him perform in domestic football, an all-consuming, winning effort when he appeared as a late substitute for Manchester United in an FA Cup tie at Aston Villa last season.

Such a Rooney could carry a much less distinguished coach than you to glory, and this no doubt is what persuaded your predecessor Eriksson to take him to the last World Cup when he was plainly a mile away from true fitness – and confidence.

It should be noted, maybe, that your countrymen who won that World Cup were not exactly blessed with the most sublime of talent. That belonged to Argentina and Brazil and France with the last of Zidane, or so we thought, but Marcello Lippi produced a winning team out of tremendous resolve and an inexhaustible sense of team.

Surely we would settle for some of that over the next few days. We would be comforted by the idea that someone in English football is still capable of asking the right questions – and getting some answers that say that there is still a flame or two flickering in what is left of the national game.

Toon Army must stand up for beliefs or remain for ever on its knees

If it is true – and, sadly, we have to believe, it is – that Kevin Keegan failed his test at Newcastle, we can only hope that his most passionate supporters do not do the same when their club play their next home game against Hull City.

Surely there has never been such a legitimate call for a boycott of a football match by fans who like to think of themselves as the greatest in the land but whose record says that they are the most willing to accept serial abuse and humiliation.

Keegan failed at Newcastle because he accepted the outrageous imposition of Dennis Wise as a man who would make the deals. From that moment he was not a manager but a time-server and the idea of his revived role as a messiah was nothing more than a pathetic fantasy.

If the Toon Army is anything more than a downtrodden, emotionally drained rabble it must be surely make this point when it is next required to show up in its rip-off souvenir shirts and apparent willingness to take anything that comes down the wire from the likes of the latest owner, Mike Ashley.

It must say that much more than enough has been visited on the club which it purports to love so deeply.

It must say that Ashley's populist stunt of coming into its midst wearing the shirt and supping the pints has become nothing so much as a gross insult to its intelligence.

It must declare that the cycle of Keegan, Dalglish, Gullit, Robson, Souness, Allardyce and Keegan again has to be over, that the club has to learn some basic respect for the men they put in charge, however superficially, of their football affairs and those who are expected to support the whole idiotic enterprise.

Somehow the Toon Army persuaded itself that Keegan could re-kindle some of the old optimism.

It was a madness fuelled by a complete refusal to face facts. Now the Toon Army, surely, has do something which will prevent it from becoming indistinguishable from the shameless organisation that has for long played on its increasingly threadbare emotions. It has to grow up.

Quality of mercy must be examined when basic discipline breaks down

When the recidivist thug Joey Barton belatedly faced Football Association justice yesterday there was little surprise in the plea for leniency that came from Gordon Taylor of the Professional Football Association. It is a standard reflex, forthcoming when Eric Cantona assaulted a Crystal Palace fan, when Rio Ferdinand missed a drugs test and Stan Collymore asked for a loyalty bonus from Nottingham Forest after contriving a move to Liverpool.

Compassion is a wonderful quality but it shouldn't get in the way of basic standards of justice. It shouldn't take away any value in behaving properly, or with a modicum of professional discipline and responsibility.