Capello confident his England team good enough

WEMBLEY, England (AP) - England coach Fabio Capello is confident his underachieving team will reach the goals set out Tuesday by the Football Association - to at least reach the semifinals of major championships by 2012.

Although England failed to qualify for next month's European Championship, Capello believes the players he inherited from the fired Steve McClaren are capable of not only reaching the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012, but also of making a big impact.

"I think that you must always be positive," Capello said at Wembley Stadium as the FA launched its Vision 2008-12 mission statement. "My personal objective with every time I have coached and managed is to go to the top, so it's no surprise that these targets have been set. I believe that it's important to have these targets and to work towards them.

"I think we should all be confident with this because the team I have at the moment, I think, is capable of achieving these objectives."

England beat Switzerland 2-1 in Capello's first game as coach in February, but his team lost 1-0 to France in March. Both games were friendlies because England failed to qualify for Euro 2008 and doesn't play its first qualifying matches for the 2010 World Cup until September.

Before then, England has a friendly against the United States at Wembley on May 28, another at Trinidad and Tobago on June 1 and then against the Czech Republic on Aug. 20.

The FA's Vision mission statement is an attempt to strengthen soccer at all levels in England.

The document includes the specific goal that England's senior men's and women's teams should make it to at least the semifinals of major competitions by 2012. That would include the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and Euro 2012 in Ukraine and Poland.

The FA plans to coach children as young as five and hopes that, by the time of the 2010 World Cup, a million youngsters aged up to 11 will be involved in the coaching schemes.

Right now, about 125,000 teams are registered with the FA, which is due to move its headquarters from Soho Square in central London to Wembley. It hopes to have 20,000 more by 2012 and that 8,000 more referees will be recruited to add to the 26,000 currently officiating at all levels.

The FA wants to have a National Football Center by 2010 at Burton in central England. This is a project that has been in limbo for several years, but the FA has finally given the go-ahead to build it at a cost of more than 20 million pounds (US$39.2 million; €25.4 million).

Capello, who coached AC Milan, AS Roma, Juventus and Real Madrid to multiple titles at club level, does not think the FA's announcement is rushing him.

"I am not under any pressure," he said. "I came here to become England manager with the view and the intent of doing things, and I think we can achieve good things because we have got a good team.

"You need to work all the time knowing that the road is long and you need to improve from one day to the next with the view of achieving the important targets that we have set. The past is past. I am confident, I have a good team and I can work on it in order to achieve the targets I have been set."

One of the proposals suggested by FIFA and UEFA to help strengthen national teams is that clubs should field a maximum of five overseas players in domestic games. Some teams, notably England's Arsenal and Italy's Inter Milan, regularly take the field with no homegrown players at all.

But such quotas are against European Union employment law and David Triesman, a former government minister who is now the FA chairman, said he would not support them.

"I understand exactly why (FIFA president) Sepp Blatter and others have made the proposal," he said. "They believe more players eligible for the national sides should play in the principal leagues for their sides. But trying to get European employment law changed may turn out to be too high a hurdle, and I don't want to spend a huge amount of time arguing about the construction of European law if it can't be pulled off.

"What I do think is that it's worth doing everything else that we can which helps bring players through who are eligible to play for England. But I don't propose that we try to do things that are illegal."