SOCCER:Fabio Capello will subject potential members of England's underperforming side to a month of intense scrutiny before deciding whether they are deserving of a place in his first squad.

Speaking at his first press conference since agreeing a €9 million-a-year, four-year deal with the English Football Association last week, Capello made it clear yesterday that reputation and past performance will count less than attitude and form as he sets about rebuilding England's credibility.

Speaking mainly through an interpreter, Capello, who promised to learn English by the time the squad meet for the first time, offered few words of encouragement for individual players, preferring to state his general principles.

"A place in the national squad has to be deserved, and it will be based on behaviour, play on the field and attitude," he said.

The Italian officially starts work on January 7th, but said he had already started preparing for the job and had watched the weekend's Premier League games, including Sunday's big

televised Liverpool-Manchester United and Arsenal-Chelsea encounters with his first squad in mind.

Among his priorities, he said, would be establishing why a team blessed with gifted footballers had failed to reach the final stages of Euro 2008. To that end he will subject himself to the ordeal of watching all England's qualifying games from that campaign.

He also committed to restoring the players' pride in wearing the national shirt, echoing the sentiment of every incoming England manager since Alf Ramsey.

"All the coaches that have previously coached England have believed that England would play a pivotal role in major championships.

"I don't believe they were wrong. Now I want to speak to players and make sure that wearing the shirt is about pride for them," he said.

"I believe that English footballers are born with the will to win inside them as well as the ability to win, and I hope to be the man to get that out of them. I am confident that I will."

The Italian declined to be drawn on the future of the current captain, John Terry, though the broken metatarsals that yesterday ruled him out for up to three months has removed one immediate dilemma, but gave encouragement to former England captain David Beckham as he contemplates winning his 100th cap in Capello's first game, a friendly against Switzerland in February.

He also cited Beckham as an example of what hard work can achieve.

The pair fell out when Capello arrived at Real Madrid, but Beckham redeemed himself on the training ground and eventually played a leading role in Real's charge to the league title last season.

"He was a great player at Madrid and a great asset," Capello said.

"He is a very important player for England. We had a contrasting relationship at Real but he showed he is a great man and a great player.

"David's behaviour and fitness are also important and there is still a month for such important decisions to be made."

Capello plans to meet leading players and Premier League managers early in the new year. He rejected the suggestion that he would struggle to impose his ideas on club players, stressing his good relations with Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, Rafael Benitez and Juande Ramos.

The consultation will be part of a process of acclimatising to a role that Capello conceded could be as challenging for him as the players.

"Being manager of England is very different from being manager of a club, and my behaviour has to change, as does that of the players. A strict style of coaching is something that I can only apply if I work with the players on a daily basis and so I need to find a new way of working. It is something I have already started thinking about and it will develop.

"I have to watch all of the games in the last campaign but the style that England adopt will depend on the players available to me. There should be a style of play but it is equally important to be flexible."

Capello took his bow surrounded by the ghosts of football past. Eight years ago Glenn Hoddle sat in the Westbourne Room at the Royal Lancaster Hotel having been sacked as England coach, protesting that his views on the disabled and the afterlife had been misrepresented.

A few hundred yards away stands the FA's former headquarters in Lancaster Gate, where for decades Englishmen in blazers hired English coaches to lead the national team.

Yesterday Capello stepped into the same room and insisted that the reign of the second foreigner to take the job would not end in familiar failure.