This is the moment at which having a much-decorated Italian in charge of the England team comes into its own. As John Terry stepped up to the interview podium, on the occasion of his second coronation as England captain, it began to dawn on many in the room what a shrewd cookie Fabio Capello has been. He has kept the same captain that Steve McClaren installed two years ago, yet somehow contrived to make the appointment seem like his own. He did not change for the sake of it, nor bow to a budding army of moralists, and the fact that another England manager, a failed one at that, had the thought first did not matter a jot. That is what confidence does for you.

Capello has talked at length about his players needing to perform with assurance under pressure and tonight, against the Czech Republic at Wembley, we shall see if he has taken that message from the bench to the field of play. If the self-belief that was so clearly absent during crucial matches under the previous incumbent, McClaren, is missing again this season, England may face a fearful reckoning in Croatia next month.

Dismissing such negativity, Capello has already talked of winning in Zagreb — England would be the first to do so in a competitive match — and tonight’s performance will chart his progress and reveal whether he is merely whistling to keep his spirits up or whether, in a matter of months, with limited access to his players, he has already gone farther in enabling talented individuals to play with the same bravado they demonstrate at club level.

There is a video doing the rounds that highlights what was wrong before. Poor old McClaren was giving an interview to a Dutch television station, in English, and working so hard to be liked by his inquisitor that he ended up speaking his own language in a Dutch accent, coming across like Harry Enfield’s liberal Amsterdam cop: masshiv underdogsh, fantashtik, yah.

Now we can all laugh at this (indeed, on viewing it is impossible not to), but, sadly, what is exposed is one of the main reasons McClaren’s European Championship campaign ended in failure. Knowing that he was an unpopular choice from the start, he cared too much about what others thought. He wanted to be liked, he wanted to be appreciated, and as a result probably suffered from the same confidence issues as his players because he knew what a losing campaign would mean for his country, and his career.

Talking to him before Arsenal’s match against his new club, FC Twente, last week, he admitted that failing to qualify for a leading tournament as England manager as good as made a coach unemployable, short term, in the Premier League. He was philosophical about this, said it went with the territory.

Even so, armed with the knowledge, as England stuttered and stumbled through the qualification process, it cannot have made for an untroubled soul. Realisation of the dire consequence of failure does not inspire, it undermines. Avram Grant knew that he had to win the Champions League to keep his job, and Chelsea’s players say that he was the most nervous figure in the dressing-room before the final against Manchester United.

McClaren is a foreign manager in the Eredivisie, and financially quite possibly the best-rewarded coach there, but he is still thinking like a man with something to prove, who knows that he has to make at least a moderate success of the position to climb the next rung on the ladder.

Still, he wants to fit in. Capello has no such pressure. Reputation, financial security, self-esteem: all are intact regardless of whether he turns England into World Cup winners. If confidence is the missing ingredient in the national team, he is the best man to build it because he has so much to spare. Sven-Göran Eriksson did, too. The advantage of appointing the successful foreign coach, as Chelsea have quickly discovered with Luiz Felipe Scolari, is the absence of fear. Scolari approaches his work with the absolute conviction of the proven winner, as does Capello.

If there is a drawback in this arrangement, it will be felt long term, in the establishment of the principle that only a man with the perfect CV is capable of inspiring England’s footballers. Other countries work with the best available from within their system, but the FA has abandoned that concept and it may be impossible to return to it. Any Englishman that was even moderately successful in club football would instantly become a target for the national association, so the elite clubs will surely think twice about appointing one. Englishmen will therefore not have the track record to compare with foreign coaches and will be regarded as inferior. Stuart Pearce, the England Under-21 head coach, may buck this trend if he is successfully groomed under Capello’s tutelage, but there are no guarantees.

In essence, although nothing in the Fifa rulebook forbids a foreign appointment, English football is cheating. Clubs are bottom-line businesses and have no boundaries, but national football aspires to greater meaning, pitting the wit of one country against another to demonstrate the strength of its game. Now, if England win the 2010 World Cup it will be as much Italy’s victory: Italian coaching, Italian knowhow, Italian ideals. By appointing Capello, instead of solving a problem, English football seeks a short-cut to the answer. Take two children and a tough mathematics question: 427,649 x 221,952. Give one a pen and a piece of paper and the other a calculator. The machine has it cracked before the other child has the first line of calculations written, but given time, who will be better at arithmetic? Capello is England’s calculator; he gives us an answer we cannot fathom on our own.

The time for ethical debate has long gone, however, so for now we should just make the most of it and allow Capello to concentrate on bringing a level of belief to the national team that would have been unattainable under an English manager. The captaincy issue has been resolved with the sensible preservation of the status quo, now the hard work begins.

If anything, perhaps Capello’s only aberration so far has been to become embroiled in a discussion about an issue that would barely have registered on the Continent. Terry had done nothing wrong as captain, so why make him feel he was being punished by taking his title away?

There is a theory that the whole captaincy audition was a handy diversionary tactic that allowed the manager to iron out wrinkles in his team early on, while the focus of the media was elsewhere, but this would afford Capello a devious streak that would trouble the conscience of Machiavelli. More likely, his employers were partly to blame for the overblown nature of the issue, particularly a commercial department that craves a marketable figurehead, and would have been utterly thrown by the Italian concept of giving the armband to the player with the most caps on a match-by-match basis (although, in the present squad, the captain would always be David Beckham, if he started, which would suit it nicely).

The captaincy X Factor that took place last season was incongruous, considering Capello’s wish for self-assured players as, in the end, either Terry would have had to be disappointed, or the hopes of a rival such as Rio Ferdinand or Steven Gerrard would be dashed. In the end, the only change that Capello made was to swap Ferdinand for Gerrard as Terry’s understudy and it seems a grand effort for little result. Perhaps Capello was erroneously advised that the nation placed great emphasis on the role of captain. The FA, yes, and certainly the media, but had Capello explained how casually the Italians treat the position, and the many good reasons for that, he might have been surprised at the level of public acceptance.

Anyway, the great advantage of being a foreign manager — and the one that McClaren has failed to grasp in his desire to assimilate — is that the interloper is not tied down by outside opinions. One of the most telling moments in the documentary about Graham Taylor’s time as England manager is when he turns to Lawrie McMenemy, his assistant, on the bench and makes a comment about the action in relation to what Nigel Clarke, of the Daily Mirror, had written that day. Nigel would no doubt have been secretly delighted, and amazed, that he was such a significant figure in the thoughts of the England manager as an important game progressed. One cannot imagine any football writer receiving a similar endorsement of influence from Capello. Standing on the touchline, frowning, arms folded, he doesn’t look much like a man who cares what tomorrow’s headlines will bring.

McClaren learnt too late the lesson Capello knew from the start. What a nation really wants from its manager is a win, not a winning smile. Setting out his demands for tonight’s game, Capello announced that he required his team to play with spirit and without fear, but most of all with a big personality. He chose not, at that point, to break into The Lambeth Walk, brandish a black pudding or address anybody in the room as “me old china”. He is Italian, you see. They do things differently over there.