When he bowed to the baying of the mob by stripping Terry of the captaincy of his country, he set a dangerous precedent. He sent out a message that the England skipper has to be beyond reproach in his private life as well as his professional life or else he gets fired. Well done Fabio – you just flashed a green light at every gold digger and muck raker who wants the England captain as a trophy. Every pimp and every hooker, every thief and low-life, have got dollar signs in front of their eyes now. You beckoned them on and you told them the man who wears the armband is fair game.

You missed a chance to prove to your players that you wouldn’t bow to a media campaign. And by doing that, for the first time since you took over, you gave the players a reason to doubt and distrust you. Let’s hope that Capello is clear with the other players and indeed his own backroom staff about just where the moral boundaries lie. Do you have to sleep with a teammate’s ex-girlfriend to get the sack? Will you get fired if it’s merely a married woman? What about if you’re single but you sleep around? If you’re a man who loves women, is that enough to get you in trouble?

Capello has made all these questions real and live now. He has legitimised them. And he has painted a target on his players’ backs in the process. Next in the firing line as Terry’s replacement is Rio Ferdinand, apparently. Talk about handing Ferdinand a poisoned chalice. I feel sorry for the Manchester United defender already. Nobody should have to live their life under that kind of scrutiny.

Switching to the oval ball, writing in the Telegraph Will Greenwood gives us a surprisingly honest appraisal of the Mathew Tait inclusion in England’s team to face Wales. Greenwood was everything you could want in an outside centre, strong, creative, dynamic and – most importantly – dangerous. So it is interesting to hear that he questions whether Tait has the necessary devil inside him to fulfil his undoubted potential.

Thrown in against Wales as a kid, the only thing we remember is the photogenic dump tackle by Gavin Henson. Dropped immediately, it was as if England's problems were all down to him. Tait kept his own counsel and said nothing when he was dropped. I liked that about him, and was impressed when he got on with his job at Newcastle.

Since then, at Newcastle, with his new club Sale and at times England, he has been in and out of the team, always, according to the experts, misused, out of position, filling in or the final throw of the dice by a coach running out of ideas. The rugby gods have treated Tait harshly. People talk of his potential, point to the 2007 World Cup final and say he put in a man-of-the-match performance. I will give him that one wonderful break that had the South Africans scrabbling. Very nice. But I also remember the soft three points he conceded in his own 22.

That is the dilemma you have with Tait. On the one hand you want your stars to be nice guys, with plenty of pace, good balance, someone who can make the breaks. He ticks a lot of the right boxes. On the flip side, you know that by picking him you also have a man who will drop off tackles, who will be loose with the ball in contact, will make errors that can only be attributed to lack of concentration, and lacks essential nastiness.

Compare him with Tana Umaga, Stirling Mortlock, Jaque Fourie and Brian O'Driscoll. It's a tough school, I know, but that is the nature of the beast. Great centres don't say please and thank you. They have real edge and can be nasty, hard men. I don't get that with Tait, and that is what makes his selection for England all the more interesting.

It looks like a punt, especially as Tait has not been in the sort of form that demands inclusion. Dan Hipkiss would have been the compact option. The ball-carrying centre, the target man, error free, strong defensively. The only problem Hipkiss has is he lacks the ability to step and feint and go away from people in an outside channel. So that's what England seem to want.
They have the comfort of Delon Armitage back in the side, and with that extra stability around manager Martin Johnson and attack coach Brian Smith seem prepared to throw in a lad with weaknesses but with a genuine outside break. That should tell us a lot about the way England will attack Wales. Make Tait chase kicks all day and run crash balls and you might as well pick James Haskell in the midfield, he would do a better job.