Why the hell are you on the beach, Fabio Capello? Go back to South Africa and learn something!

The Football Association yesterday confirmed that Fabio Capello will still be on holiday this weekend but will not tell us exactly where he is recovering from the nasty shock of being told he must serve two more excruciating years as the manager of England.

That is a pity because I really wanted to ask him what the hell he thinks he's playing at sunning himself on a beach in his grotesque Speedo swimming trunks instead of doing the job for which some Santa Claus of the English game is paying him £6million a year.

If Capello were serious about retrieving our national team from the bottom of the cesspit into which he has just helped it to drop, he would be in Johannesburg on Sunday night watching Holland and Spain contest the World Cup final.Send him back: Fabio Capello should get off the beach and return to South Africa to learn some valuable lessons

By rights, he should have been in South Africa for the last 10 days or so to study at close quarters the football with which Germany, Holland and, most beautifully of all, Spain are defining a future which is beyond his imagination.

While this is also a game never to be seen in the self-congratulatory Barclays Premier League, it has to be mastered if this country is ever to win the World Cup again.

For Capello to be anywhere else during the quarter-finals, semi-finals and the final itself is nothing less than dereliction of duty.

Watching on television is not the same. The tactical sweep of the game, the off-the-ball movement and the intensity of the physical challenge are among the vital elements obscured by the box.

Nor can he engage through his widescreen TV in the stimulating dialogue with the assembled host of great football men who are looking on as the game - as it always does - evolves during the World Cup.

By JEFF POWELL   THE24 FLOP: