England let their striking solution slip through the net

As a listless and disjointed England face the opening matches in their qualifying campaign for the 2010 World Cup, crumbs of comfort are thin on the plate. This week's news from Fifa, however, suggests that Fabio Capello at least has a better base from which to start his work than was made available to Sven-Goran Eriksson seven and a half years ago. When the Swede named his first squad for World Cup 2002 qualifiers against Finland and Albania, England had just tumbled to 16th in Fifa's ranking of the world's footballing nations. This week his Italian successor learnt that they have dropped to 15th.

Capello has spent the early months of his tenure shuffling the same resources that failed to bring the required results for Eriksson. He has been repeatedly banging his head against hideously familiar problems, none of which appears more acute than the absence of firepower.

In his five matches in charge, all of them friendlies, Capello's team have scored nine goals. Only one recognised striker, however, has managed to hit the net. Jermain Defoe's reward for his brace against Trinidad & Tobago in June is to keep Michael Owen out of the squad for today's match against Andorra and Wednesday's meeting with Croatia. Eriksson's opinion of Defoe was made clear when he left him out of the 2006 World Cup squad in favour of a 16-year-old who had never played in the Premier League.

The ignorance of a new foreign coach can be a blessing or a curse. When it means that the available players are being examined with a fresh eye, unprejudiced by a involvement in the domestic game, the result can be a welcome clarity. Sometimes, however, it just seems like ignorance, and it is tempting to see Capello's refusal to include Owen as something other than the product of carefully distilled wisdom.

Emile Heskey's presence redoubles the suspicion that Capello, surrounded by his little cadre of fellow Italians, has not really succeeded in getting a grip on the job. For one of the lessons from the last decade is that Owen works better in partnership with Heskey, and that Heskey doesn't really work at all without Owen.

Capello can justify the exclusion of Owen by saying that he has not proved his fitness, or by pointing out that age has blunted his reflexes and his speed across the ground. The coach can argue, too, that Heskey deserves his inclusion because of his impressive form this season with Wigan Athletic. But to pick one without the other when both are available suggests that he has not done his homework.

Here are the relevant statistics. Owen and Heskey, who first teamed up in Under-18 internationals and were united at Liverpool for four seasons, have played together 26 times for the senior England team, starting together on 14 occasions. In those matches, Owen scored 14 goals to Heskey's four: obvious, then, which was the predator and which the provider.

On the occasions when they were kept apart by injury or selection, the results have been equally enlightening. Without Heskey, Owen scored 26 goals in 63 matches. Without Owen, Heskey has one goal in 20 appearances. Clearly one benefits the other, most obviously in the five-goal demolition of Germany in Munich in September 2001, when both men scored, and most recently when the partnership was restored - after a three-year hiatus - by a desperate Steve McClaren last September, Owen scoring three times in the Wembley victories over Israel and Russia as the Euro 2008 qualification campaign neared its unhappy climax.

Facing decent opposition in competitive matches, they looked like a pair of mature forwards who complemented and understood each other. If injuries had not intervened to disrupt the partnership before the concluding match against Croatia, they would surely have provided England with a passage to the finals.

Had another striker, or a striking partnership, come along to establish a better record of success, then claims made on behalf of the duo could not be made with such conviction. But Wayne Rooney, whose emergence in 2003 pushed Heskey into the shadows, has mystifyingly failed to train on as an international goalscorer, while Defoe, Capello's preferred replacement for Owen, can count a mere five goals in 29 appearances, and Peter Crouch's remarkable record of 14 in 28 can only be seen in its true light when the nature of the opposition is taken into account.

It is possible that Capello has something new to show us over the next few days. Perhaps, against the kind of opposition England can expect to meet in Barcelona's Olympic Stadium this evening, he will have the courage to entrust Theo Walcott with a central striking role, using the Arsenal teenager's speed and directness alongside or just ahead of Rooney. Maybe the admirable Jimmy Bullard will be given an opportunity to revive a stagnant central midfield, with Gareth Barry in support.

The presence of two relatively fresh faces is certainly welcome, although Capello's essentially conservative nature may inhibit him from simply ushering them towards the stage and inviting them get on with expressing themselves. At the moment he appears to be helplessly trapped between a discredited past and an untried future, lacking the deep knowledge or the instinctive ingenuity that would help him make the best of a profoundly unpromising situation.