Football and spectacles: Players make passes for men who wear glasses | Fabio Capello
SportblogFabio Capello This article is more than 12 years oldFootball and spectacles: Players make passes for men who wear glasses
This article is more than 12 years oldHarry PearsonRecent history suggests that Fabio Capello's choice of eyewear might prove more important for England than his tacticsMuch talk has been given over to whether the England manager, Fabio Capello, should change his formation. However, those of us who really know about football have been far more concerned over whether the Italian should change his glasses. Spectacle frames may seem a trivial thing to the uninitiated, with their naive fixation on holding players and midfield threesomes, but football is a trivial business. And you'd be wise not to forget it.
I imagine that Don Fabio himself is well aware of the importance of eyewear. After all, he learned his trade at Milan under the master of the pressing game, Arrigo Sacchi. The former Italy coach began his career as a shoe salesman and went into football coaching at the tender age of 26. Managing players who were often older than himself he had to assert his authority somehow and did so by adopting a pair of specs so massive they looked like they'd been plucked from the face of Timmy Mallett.
Under Sacchi the rossoneri took a scudetto and a brace of European Cups. There is foolish talk about the importance of his zonal defence, and while this may have had the occasional bearing on results it is plain to any genuine thinker about the game that the whopping great sunglasses he insisted on wearing even when it was dark had a far more profound effect.
Sacchi's influence was soon to be seen on other Italian bosses such as Marcello Lippi, but perhaps the man who benefited most from the lessons the Milan manager had taught Serie A was the future England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson. Speaking of his compatriot in the euphoria that greeted England's sensational thrashing of Germany in Munich in 2001, the football correspondent of Svenska Dagbladet commented, "When [Sven] changed his spectacles a few years ago he made himself look more like a professor." Given the suggestibility of footie folk it is impossible to underplay the significance of this apparently off-hand remark. In football a player can earn himself the nickname of "prof" just by knowing that there is more uses for a book than propping up a wobbly card-table. Like a 1960s comic this is a place where bifocals are synonymous with boffinhood.
Before the spec-change Eriksson was a manager with a respectable but hardly earth-shattering reputation. But after trading in his old frames for something a touch more academic looking, the Swede won the Italian double with Lazio and went on to give England supporters a brief and joyous glimpse of triumph. How much that owed to Eriksson's finely honed technical skills and how much to the boost his new glasses gave to his team's confidence in him is hard to pin down for definite. But one thing is for sure – he never changed his tactics. Ever. As Thomas Hardy observed, "Who seems most kingly is the King." If the players believe in the manager then that is half the battle won. Sven may never have been thinking about much more than whose dishwasher he was hoping to fill next, but his specs made him look studious and it is appearances that count.
Footballers are by and large a superstitious breed, much taken with the significance of portents and omens. It cannot have escaped their notice, for example, that the World Cup has never been won by a coach with excessive facial hair. When the going gets tough, the tough get shaving, as the old saying has it. Likewise, subliminally at least, our nation's finest must have absorbed the fact that the majority of the managers who have recently dominated the domestic and world game – including Aimé Jacquet, Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger – wear glasses.
This is a new development. Although the round spectacles and baggy suits "Politburo look" was popular in the 1930s with managers such as Herbert Chapman and the most successful of all Italians, Vittorio Pozzo (who looked like a chubby, clean-shaven version of Trotsky), it fell out of style after the second world war. By the 1970s managers had divided themselves into three distinctive schools: the bosses [sharply suited in the manner of Hank Marvin and The Shadows], the gaffers [tracksuit trousers, sweatshirts, with a whistle round their neck and the general air of a games teacher who also took geography up to year nine] and the genial uncles [best exemplified by Helmut Schön of West Germany who favoured a flat cap and a garment from Adidas with buttons up the front that might best be described as a track-cardie]. They did not look like professors, nor did they want to. Football was a visceral rather than mental activity.
Brian Clough, Bill Shankly, Don Revie, Joe Mercer, Sir Alf Ramsey: none of these great men wore glasses. Well, not openly anyway. But times have changed. Not that it is simply a question of sticking on any old pair of bifocals. As Eriksson's shift demonstrated, they must also be the right type. The only England manager to flagrantly wear spectacles, before Sven and Fabio, was Graham Taylor. Alas all those years spent in close proximity to Elton John had not had an altogether positive influence on the Watford boss. His glasses were far too accounts department to be credible, with the inevitable consequences. No one expects Capello to tinker with things too much, but a touch of tortoiseshell would surely work wonders.
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