The World Cup and England will be a little richer if Joe Cole makes it to South Africa
Those 32 minutes of normal time, plus the two minutes indicated by the fourth official, seem to have been enough to convince Fabio Capello, the sternest of judges. Joe Cole’s cameo in the 8-0 thrashing of Wigan on Sunday appears to have secured the Chelsea midfielder’s place on the list of 30 players called into England’s World Cup preparations. And thank goodness for that.
Had Capello omitted Cole, as seemed likely, we would have been asking whether the £6m-a-year manager, supposedly a master of the art of Italian defence, had scored a second own-goal only 24 hours after his widely criticised launch of a player assessment software toy. A computer game capable of persuading Capello that the Chelsea midfielder was not good enough to join his party would not have been worth giving to a 10-year-old. But since its initial conclusions placed Cole second to Karim Benzema, who scored off the bench for Real Madrid, as Europe’s player of the week, it might just be worth adding to the Christmas list.
The signs had been ominous. “He is no longer the Joe Cole I remember,” Capello said some weeks ago, having watched the player’s attempts to regain his form after missing most of last year following knee surgery. But Capello was at Stamford Bridge on Sunday to witness a half-hour display that was exactly the Joe Cole we all remember: effervescent, imaginative, unselfish, eager to a fault, giving the crowd just a hint of the fantasy so rarely at the command of English footballers.
Cole has not had as much time on the pitch for Chelsea as he would have wanted in recent months because, during his absence, Carlo Ancelotti found a formation he liked and a player, Florent Malouda, whom he persuaded to cast aside the cloak of anonymity. Malouda started doing the job that had previously been Cole’s, and he did it very well. Ancelotti was not inclined to take unnecessary chances at a critical time of the season.
Not surprisingly, then, Cole found it hard to recapture his true form. Whenever he did get a chance, his puppyish keenness, even at 28 and with 53 caps and World Cups and European championships behind him, often caused him to try too hard, an endearing trait that can take the edge off his effectiveness.
Capello is not so laden with creative resources that he can afford to ignore one of the few English players blessed with the gift of imagination. It is his job to bring the best out of the player by showing trust and instilling confidence. But Capello’s insistence on discipline and rigour seemed to have turned him against a player who, in Germany four years ago, was the only credible rival to Owen Hargreaves as England’s player of the tournament and who surely had much more to
