Let's All Argue About Fabio Capello

It's the resignation of the England football manager that everyone is talking about – but should Fabio Capello have been allowed to quit as England manager, thus consigning yet another international tournament to failure? Or should he have been kept on, and left to gambol free with John Terry in his utopian dreamland where people are deemed innocent until they are proven guilty? Let's have an argument about it in an attempt to make everything better.

FABIO CAPELLO WILL DO LIKE HE DAMNED WELL PLEASE
by Fabio Capello

I'm going to-a bake a pizza pie. My hovercraft is full of eels. John Terry – I know a-nothing. Mi scuzi, j'ai un reunion maintenant. The man he say a word which in Italy we know to be harmless. Fabio have many friends of the colours in Italy. It don't a matter if you blue, green, black, yellow, Fabio love you all. In Italy, we say 'picaninio' as a way to show the affection for los negro-negros. So what if he look like a monkey? Fabio look like a leather cloth you clean the windshield with. He don't care. Take yourself a joke, matey, as they say in England.

Honestly, Fabio love the English – the Madame Tussauds, the six million pounds a year, the Beckingham Palace, the traditional cosy English caviar bar, the London Eye Wheel, the quaint English tradition of property speculation, Stone Hinge, your comedy duo Anton Dec. But Fabio have his limits. Fabio a patient man, but Fabio not gonna be pushed around by anyone just cos they pay him the five hundred thousand pounds every month in the Cayman Islands bank account to keep his trap shut. He need the best players to lose in the quarter finals. How he gonna draw with Armenia if he has to rely on a defender worth only £19 million, not £20million? How he gonna lose a pool game to Slovakia if he not got John Terry to tell the Motson man "We should have taken advantage of more opportunities" afterwards? It don't make no sense. No one else in the England team got the crazy intellectual power of John Terry – he a genius with words (no, not the words you thinking of, Mr FA, hahaha!).

Fabio just wish the FA could see what Terry say to me in the dressing room about los charcoalios. Then they really understand that what Terry say on the pitch is like a side-salad. Mr FA, you just lucky he not do his impressions with the banana and The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, then you really see what racism mean. OK. Now time for bye-bye. Ola chica. Sandwiche tostado. Signoritas. Mi scuzzi. Bunga-bunga. Figaro, Figaro.

What's-a matter you? Annoyed and infuriated by this opinion? Find some much-needed empathy and solace at this dark hour on page two.

FABIO CAPELLO WAS WRONG TO RESIGN
by Oliver Motson-Winter

Ever since Luis Suarez set the ball rolling a few months ago by calling Patrice Evra a 'pestillent rhinitic Hottentot', the issue of racism has been a political football in football. And this week, Fabio Capello cleared the crossbar from the penalty spot with a backheel. By which I mean he was wrong to speak out against the FA. He followed it with a studs-up sliding tackle inside the box that resulted in a massive own goal. By which I mean he was wrong to resign. If Terry is now found guilty, he will be cross in the box. By which I mean he will be angry in prison.

What's most ironic is that Capello has destroyed himself defending someone who is definitely guilty. Fabio kept whining about the need for a fair trial first. Well, the one thing we don't need in this case is the testing of a hypothesis by the presentation of argument and evidence in a court of law. Just look at JT: white trash upbringing, crew-cut, Chelsea player. If that man isn't a massive racist I'll eat my hat. Even if he didn't actually say those words, we all know that people like him must've thought them in their time: people like him are always thinking those sorts of things – have web forums taught us nothing?

Of course, for all the hoo-ha, I'd be the first to admit that English football has come a long way in addressing these delicate issues. Just 20 years ago, racism was everywhere on the terraces. As a white man, I couldn't turn up to support Huddersfield Town at home without people shouting out  “Hey whitey,” “Oi whiteface,” and “Look everybody! It's white-o-clock.” Fans throwing Tipp-Ex on the pitch. Fans making Oxbridge noises under their breath as you walked past. But gradually, things have gotten a lot better, thanks in part to some sterling work by the FA, including their “White Is Alright” campaign, featuring prominent white stars of the day like Gareth Southgate and Chris Waddle.

Well, all that sterling work has been undone now by petulant Capello. Can't Fabio see that, underneath it all, when you strip off the outer epidermis, and correct for facial structure, height, musculature and respective ethnographic norms of penis-size, we're all the same? If you prick Anton Ferdinand, does he not bleed? If you offer him a £2 million manor house in the Cotswolds, does he not buy it for the missus to keep her horsies at? If you roast a tart, does he not say "bagsies the business end after you"? Precisely – and he deserves a basic level of human respect because of that. And believe me, if you've ever seen Anton publicly admonish an under-appreciative waiter at The Wolseley, you'll understand exactly how passionately he craves respect.

In the meantime, the next coach of the national football team must conform to national norms, and if not, he must go. We have a long and proud tradition in Britain of prosecuting people for holding opinions we don't share. We, the English, hate racism, and if Capello doesn't like that, then it is probably better that he now fucks off back to Italy to eat spaghetti carbonara with his wop chums.

@HurtGavinHaynes

Previously: Let's All Argue About Ed Sheeran's Weight Problem

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