So English soccer — still covered with embarrassment at its recent failure to qualify for next year’s European championship — has decided to go Italian.

The Englishman, Steve McClaren, who presided over that latest debacle has been fired. Into the job comes Italy’s Fabio Capello, who is given the task of trying to get England’s national team to be as good as it always thinks it is.

His job — for which he will be paid a reported $8 million a year — may well be impossible. Making England a world power in the sport can only happen if England has a nucleus of world-class players — which it does not.

Why would that be? Part of the answer was on view over the weekend at the clash between two of the country’s top teams, Arsenal and Chelsea. A rip-roaring game, a blood-and-guts contest full of non-stop action and hard, often vicious, tackling. A battle, from start to finish, that allowed only occasional flashes of good soccer to shine through the aggression.

For many, that is a description of English soccer at its best. Maybe. But the odd thing here is that there were only five English players on the field (all of them in Chelsea’s colors). The fiery nature of the English game is evidently something that infects the foreign players, for everyone joined in the fray with wild abandon.

But the key to this red-blooded, highly physical approach to the game belonged to the sixth Englishman on the field — referee Alan Wiley. Not that Wiley did anything wrong — by English standards, that is. But by international standards — in other words, the very standards that will apply to Capello’s national team — Wiley was a disaster.

The level of violence allowed by Wiley would simply not be tolerated by top international referees. There was a particularly ugly sequence of fouls that resulted in two players having to leave the game — a sequence that was surely a direct result of Wiley’s far too lenient approach.

In an overheated game, the sequence started when Chelsea’s John Terry — an Englishman — clumsily kicked Arsenal’s Spanish midfielder Cesc Fabregas as he lay on the ground, already knocked down by another tackle. Wiley gave Terry a yellow card — arguably, Terry should have been ejected. After that, revenge was in the air, and it came only five minutes later when Arsenal’s Ivory Coast midfielder Emmanuel Eboue trod heavily on Terry’s foot. This was surely a red-card offense but, once again, Wiley produced only a yellow — and, incredibly, signaled that the yellow was for repeated fouling, not specifically for the foul on Terry. The mayhem permitted by Wiley’s refusal to mete out the proper punishment continued. Eboue got his comeuppance in the second half when he was cut down by another of Chelsea’s Englishmen, Joe Cole. Cole, of course, got only a yellow. Eboue left the field on a stretcher. The latest news is that both Terry and Eboue have injuries that will need a few weeks to heal.

When the dust settled, Arsenal had won the game 1–0, and referee Wiley had handed out nine yellow cards — but no reds. Had this been an international game, under a strict international referee, both Eboue and Cole, and probably Terry, would have been ordered off.

In fact, I’m tempted to say that had this game been played anywhere other than England, with anyone other than an English referee, it would have featured at least two red cards.

The hyper-aggression of the English game, and the crudity of technique that it inevitably encourages are the main problems that Capello will have to face in trying to put England where it feels it belongs: on top of the soccer world.

To my eye, he will be not succeed. The basic requirements of the English game seem to me too deeply ingrained to hope for any change. There is an English phrase, frequently used to describe a player: He gets “stuck in.” It is a physical quality that is much admired, to the point where it is probably preferred above all others, including the exhibition of superior soccer skills.

It is also thought to be a uniquely English virtue. Just how wrong that idea is was demonstrated by Arsenal’s foreigners in the game against Chelsea. They got stuck in with a vengeance and were rapturously cheered by the Arsenal supporters. But there is a difference here. Arsenal’s foreigners are capable of playing superb, flowing soccer. In fact, they usually do — and are often criticized for playing “pretty” soccer.

The pretty stuff has been working out fine, and Arsenal leads the league. But for this Chelsea game, a clash between traditional London rivals, they had to turn into street brawlers, and they managed to do that. But the foreigners can revert, and no doubt will, to their much purer soccer. The problem with the English players, those who know only how to get stuck in, is that they are incapable of playing a more cultured, patient game, a game featuring ball possession and intricate passing, a game with as much subtlety as muscularity.

Capello is not the first foreigner to try his hand at taming the English wildness. The Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson was England’s coach from 2001 to 2006, but his team won nothing, never advancing past the quarter-final round of major tournaments. Eriksson was a devotee of the possession game, but he could never make it work for England.

Indeed, he came under much criticism for even trying to make it work. It was felt that he was denaturing the English players, taking their true game away from them, making them play a “foreign” style that they could not handle. And of course, there is much truth in the criticism.

There is the conundrum that Capello faces. Either his England players adopt a style that they are uncomfortable with, or they take their English game into the international arena and find that they run into big trouble with international refereeing standards.

One factor may work in Capello’s favor and may help to make him popular with English fans: Where Eriksson was a quiet Swede, Capello is an explosive Italian. His tendency to fume and rage will likely be seen as closer to the blood and thunder of English soccer. I don’t doubt that Capello, despite his flimsy English, will firmly stamp his authority on the team. That he can do. But he can do nothing about the lack of international-class players.

Buona fortuna, Fabio — it won’t be easy!

pgardner@nysun.com