Capello orders England to dress smart and ditch the PlayStations
By NEIL ASHTON - More by this author » Last updated at 23:07pm on 4th February 2008
Fabio Capello's hardline England regime began on Monday when he presented his squad with a list of rules.
Sportsmail can reveal that the tough new measures include:
A ban on visitors, including agents and friends, from the team hotel in Hertfordshire. •
Players must eat at the same table. •
They have to be on time for meals. •
No walking around in shorts and flip-flops. •
They must wear England track suits instead and suits and ties to games. •
No mobile phones in public areas. •
A ban on the 'PlayStation culture'. Despite the strict nature of Capello's regime — the new coach refers to the players by surname only — England's players spoke enthusiastically about their new manager.
Rio Ferdinand, one of the candidates to be captain against Switzerland on Wednesday evening, claimed Capello's arrival was 'like the first day at school'.
Capello is determined to adopt a no-nonsense approach for England's under-achieving squad and wanted to distance himself from Steve McClaren and Sven Goran Eriksson's failed regimes, during which players' agents routinely wandered around the hotel and spent time with their clients while they were preparing for the doomed Euro 2008 qualifying campaign.
England's players — minus Shaun Wright-Phillips who has an ankle injury for which he will have more tests on Tuesday — were put through a tough physical work-out by fitness coach Massimo Neri at their London Colney training base on Monday morning before Capello took them for a high-intensity, hour-long training session.
They were at Wembley on Monday night for a second training session and Ferdinand admitted that Capello, who won four league titles in four different cities as a club manager, had impressed the players.
Ferdinand said: 'It was a bit like going into the first day at school. We had a good training session and he got his points across well.
'He told us that we were going to train well, train hard and that has started already. We had a meeting at 8pm on Sunday night and then had some dinner. It was just to say hello and meet his backroom staff.
'I enjoy being coached and I enjoy being coached by the best in the world. You want to suck up as much information as you can. When you have someone with his kind of CV, you have to take notice.
'Things will be tweaked, but you expect that. To expect someone to come in and take the reins in the same way as the person before is wrong. We expected changes and rightly so.'
Steven Gerrard, also a candidate for the captaincy, said: 'When we met him for the first time I think the third word that came out of his mouth was “winner”.
'He never once mentioned individuals, it's all about winning. All the things he put across in training were better than I thought they would be.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/sport/football.html?in_article_id=512328&in_page_id=1779&ct=5Yuh mean no Fifa, that is rell pressure 
