Wolves columnist John Lalley was on hand for the sight of Fabio Capello at Goodison Park and believes much about the England boss told it’s own story.

With the nights now drawing in and summer soon to be a distant memory, the unadulterated fiasco of England’s World Cup campaign is already submerged by the all consuming greed of the Premier League.

Our poor old national coach Fabio Capello, he cut an abject figure of bewilderment in South Africa, his shortcomings and those of his equally culpable players brutally exposed.

Watching a battling Wolves performance at Goodison Park last Saturday, he still bore the haunted expression of a man with a mortal sin on his conscience.

Predictably, Fleet Street’s finest have turned on him vilifying every minute detail of his stewardship, from tactics to man-management, from his deficient communication skills to his bone-headed intransigence and the heartless casting aside of David Beckham.

The hypocrisy of some elements of the press is breathtaking.

Almost to a man, they had slavishly lauded to the skies the Capello modus operandi from the moment he had taken the reigns, entranced by his tunnel-vision determination, his rigid discipline, his refusal to indulge favouritism and his Alf Ramsey style domination of the entire England operation.

They were willingly seduced by ‘Don Fabio’ certain that he and he alone would at last exploit to the last bead of sweat the latent talent of the biggest bunch of wealth-grabbing under-achievers in football history.

Now, the same bunch of metropolitan hacks turned on him convinced that Capello had morphed into the biggest Italian jester since Rigoletto.

Only now these two-faced scribblers assured us that they and nobody else knew all along that Capello’s misguided regime was doomed from the outset.

Their selective hindsight, their deluding belief in their own prescience and their pseudo-patriotic humbug, it all sticks in the craw, so much so that it’s difficult to decipher just what is worse – England’s pathetic South African adventure or the distorted volte-face of the critics.

Bubbling cravenly on the surface of much of the bile has been an unpleasant whiff of xenophobia, the sniping at Capello’s faltering English, his perceived lack of any understanding of the ‘English’ way and the grasping greed of his renegotiated contract. It was a wretched tournament and an even worse aftermath.

Their appetite for a public lynching of England managers sure has some form.

Graham Taylor, patently inadequate at international level it has to be conceded, but never deserving of the contemptuous and sneering ‘Turnip Taylor’ ridicule.

He carried that baggage with him when he arrived at Wolves and never properly rehabilitated himself until he left to his own and to our detriment.

His predecessor, Bobby Robson stood up with remarkable restraint and dignity to merciless abuse regarding his private life and his decision to move on after the 1990 World Cup.

The ‘Today’ newspaper – whatever became of that rag? – labelled him ‘a pathetic shambles of a man.’

When the then-Sir Bobby passed away, the same tabloids gushed out their predictable and fulsome tributes, sanctifying his unblemished virtue, he was the epitome of all the finest characteristics of human nature so sadly lacking in his contemporaries.

The great man must have been turning in his grave, he would have known exactly just what Capello was being subjected to.

By the time we had beaten Stoke in the season opener, most of us were past caring anyway and we were already cursing the prospect of the week off for international games after we entertain Newcastle this Saturday.

The summer saw too the inevitable but sad demise of the snooker genius Alex Higgins. His death provoked memories of early in 1973 when he played at the old Wolves social club on Waterloo Road.

There’s an evocative picture in the Wolves versus Liverpool programme of that year, with Higgins photographed cheekily balancing a snooker ball on the palm of his hand alongside a heavily bespectacled Derek Jefferson, Dave Wagstaffe, Phil Parkes and Frank Munro.

Now Higgins was the reigning World champion at the time and I remember watching entranced as he sat holding court in the bar before he lifted a cue, much to the amusement of Wolves’ then-chairman, John Ireland.

Higgins was enthusiastically rattling through enough vodka to fill a bath. He inhaled deeply on innumerable cigarettes before losing a qualifying match in the long defunct ‘Men of the Midlands’ tournament.

His opponent was Ray Reardon, all sober-sided starched white shirts and Brylcreem, who took full advantage of the Higgins mode of pre-match preparation to win a one-sided and, in truth, disappointing encounter.

By chance, the same two players qualified for the final at the old ‘Whispering Wheels’ rollerdrome in Wolverhampton.

There was a grand at stake for the winner – chicken feed now but a good purse in the days before snooker flourished as a television sport – and, this time, Higgins stayed on the wagon.

He didn’t touch a drop, he had his mind set on the winner’s cheque and he took care of Reardon in a dazzling display of nerveless match snooker.

Absolutely mesmeric he was and to see the awful images of a gaunt, emaciated and haunted man in his last years was truly sad.

Like the snooker ball he balanced at the Wolves social club, the ‘Hurricane’ had us all in the palm of his hand that night.

At half-time at Everton last Saturday, Wolves looked as if they might need a couple of snookers themselves to get back into the game.

The reversal in fortunes in the second period suggests that those pundits who have tipped the Merseysiders for the Champions League and us for the high jump might just have got both halves of the permutation seriously wrong.

What Everton do or don’t do this season concerns me not a hoot and the predictable bellyache from their boss David Moyes regarding the shuddering tackle from Adlene Guedioura which set up our equaliser, is simply another example of a manager who consistently looks for excuses when events don’t pan out to his satisfaction.

‘The boy jumps in and is over the ball,’ claimed Moyes. In other words he is saying Guedioura should have received a straight red card and we should have left Goodison Park with nothing.

He is wrong on both counts but what is abundantly clear is that Wolves have continued from where they left off towards the end of last season.

They display a supreme work ethic, a bloody-minded determination, good organization and no little skill, all of which are combining to give some genuine cause for realistic optimism.

Whether the forlorn looking Fabio caught sight of anything in a gold shirt that tickled his fancy from the Toffees director’s box, only he will know.

But with the reviling tabloid onslaught set to continue, I reckon Wolves fans will be watching a lot more Premier League football over the next few seasons than he will.