Once you navigate the perverse maze of Penn State football articles, you can find some pretty interesting stuff on the news. Between stories like “Find more dates at parties” and “Best and worst AA batteries,” I came across this little gem on Yahoo: “Capello skipping his son’s wedding for Spain friendly.” Am I missing something? Is there another definition for the word “wedding” that I’m not aware of? According to the dictionary, there isn’t. Yes, Fabio Capello, manager of England’s men’s national soccer team, missed his son’s wedding on Saturday to coach England to a 1-0 win over Spain.
We’re not talking about the World Cup here, people. We’re talking about a friendly. A scrimmage. A game that holds little to no relevance to anything important in the soccer sphere. Basically, Capello missed one of the most important days in his and his son’s life for a practice.
Pierfilippo, Capello’s 36-year-old son, married his long-time girlfriend and baby mama during a ceremony in Milan while his father watched Frank Lampard score the lone goal of the game in front of 87,000 fans. The more the merrier, I suppose. And although Spain was the defending World Cup champion, and although the English (I assume) love nothing more than a smashing game of football and a nice cup of tea, it still shouldn’t be more exciting than your own son’s wedding.
Don’t be so hasty to turn in your ballots, folks: Capello is in the running for Worst Dad of the Year, along with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,” Balloon Boy’s dad and every father who puts his kid on a leash. And while poor Pierfilippo said it wasn’t a problem that his father was missing the big day and that the whole family actually found it a little funny, I wouldn’t expect him to say anything else. Capello is already hated by the British press for not being British, so condemning him might give the Green Street Hooligans the green light to finally bash the man’s head in, or whatever it is that soccer hooligans are up to these days.
Perhaps what is most irritating is that Capello had the power to avoid this conflict altogether. When Spain insisted that the game be moved from Friday to Saturday to give the Spanish more rest after a Copa del Rey game in Barcelona, Capello didn’t even mention the wedding. Could they not have moved the friendly to Sunday? And if not, couldn’t someone else have managed just fine?
Maybe not, though. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the English need Capello more than they’ll ever know, and maybe Capello needs them just as much (cue dramatic music). But sometimes, when you love someone, you have to let them go to their son’s wedding. Even that guy who does the manual scoreboard at Fenway missed a game to walk his daughter down the aisle. So, is Capello worse than the leash parents? At least those people keep an eye on their kids.
Liz Boccolini is a freshman in the College of Communication and a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at lizboc@bu.edu
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