The talk this morning all surrounds Wayne Bridge's decision to make himself unavailable for England selection - a problem made all the more significant by Ashley Cole's injury problems. For Oliver Kay in the Times, the fact that Fabio Capello had been so confident that Bridge would happily play alongside John Terry perhaps suggests his aloof approach saw him wrong-footed over the issue.

Capello has made the impossible job look easy, taking over a demoralised squad and leading it to the World Cup finals in double-quick time, but over the past fortnight he might just have begun to identify with the gripes of some of his predecessors. He might have solved the Gerrard-Lampard conundrum, he might keep the media and WAGs at bay, and even find an antidote to the perennial loss of nerve from the penalty spot, but yesterday, perhaps for the first time since taking the job, he found himself beaten.

In the nicest possible way, Capello is a control freak and, from the moment he stripped John Terry of the captaincy three weeks ago, he felt that he had seized control of the scandal that had threatened to engulf his squad.

He knew that Wayne Bridge had been wavering over his international future, upset at having learnt that his former partner, a lingerie model named Vanessa Perroncel, had had an affair with Terry, but Capello felt that everything was OK.

“No problem,” he declared in South Africa on Tuesday, as he prepared to name both players in his squad to take on Egypt next week, but, by the time he awoke yesterday, the problem with Bridge had become insurmountable.

Capello was not expecting the news that Bridge was declaring himself “unavailable for selection”. Nor, it seemed, was Adrian Bevington, the FA’s director of communications, who seemed to be in crisis management mode as he charged off the plane almost as soon as his overnight flight from Johannesburg landed at Heathrow airport yesterday. “That wasn’t normal,” one of the journalists on the flight said.

Bridge received a telephone call from Franco Baldini, the suave Toscano whom the England players know as good cop to Capello’s bad. Baldini listened to everything that Bridge had to say and, having done so, tried to persuade the player that there was another way, that he might feel differently in a month’s time, that the scars might heal.

Bridge, though, was adamant: there was no way he wanted to be part of the same team as Terry and there was no way he could sit in a dressing room with him, sit on a coach or share a hotel with him for up to six weeks in South Africa this summer.

“They had a long conversation, but no one outside of that situation can fully understand what Wayne is feeling,” one source said. “He just felt that, with the scandal around him, he could not carry on. He had thought about this for a long time and knew what he was giving up. He made it clear that his decision was final.”

Outsiders will be surprised that Capello was so peripheral to the process, but it is simply a matter of his approach to man-management. He is distant from players, aloof, unapproachable even, and, as became clear in his handling of the Terry captaincy issue, he prefers not to deal with them by telephone. It is the antithesis of the Eriksson or Steve McClaren approach and, for most of the past 15 months, it has been lauded as a strength. Just occasionally, it might be a weakness, albeit one covered by Baldini, his right-hand man.

However, Kay feels Capello would always have preferred to have Terry in his team than Bridge.

Capello is a disciplinarian, but also a pragmatist. If it had come down to a choice between Terry and Bridge, it would have been a straightforward one. Even if Bridge’s importance increased in the light of the injury to Ashley Cole, he was not and never would be in the same rank as Terry.

Where that negative glare on the team is concerned, Capello will know that it will follow Terry in whatever he does between now and the World Cup. But even if Bridge’s decision will cause the England manager a severe headache, particularly if Cole does not recover from his broken ankle in time, it will eliminate the issues that would have arisen with Bridge and Terry as part of the squad.

For Bridge to have reached the decision he has, it must clearly be the correct one in terms of squad harmony, even if it might weaken the team and deny him a shot at glory.

There have been no winners in this sorry, tawdry tale. This has been the most challenging period of Capello’s tenure and almost certainly has made life more difficult for South Africa this summer. Difficult, but, in Capello’s eyes at least, not impossible.

Sam Wallace in the Independent, meanwhile, says Capello has been dealt so many blows in the last month that even he is seeking wise counsel.

In Sun City on Tuesday morning, guests at the resort's eponymous hotel would have noticed Fabio Capello and Marcello Lippi deep in discussion over breakfast, long after the tables around them had emptied and the staff had begun to clear up.

Capello, you suspect, is not the kind of man who readily seeks the advice of fellow managers, no matter how successful they might be. Perhaps he just wanted to tell Lippi about a new phenomenon he had discovered in the hitherto uncharted land of English football: that of the England team's unerring capacity to shoot themselves in the foot, just when things start to look good.

Once Capello coached arguably the greatest club side ever, the Milan team of Marco van Basten and Ruud Gullit and he did so while also having to deal with the interference of owner Silvio Berlusconi. In 2001, he led Roma to their first title in 18 years. And in his second spell at Real Madrid, he dropped then reinstated David Beckham and broke Barcelona's stranglehold on the Spanish league title.

These were the adventures that any great football manager would aspire to and Capello looked all these challenges in the eye and met every one. He was obliged to manage big players and solve the kind of problems that went beyond just football, like how best to handle a capricious world statesman or to shoulder the burden for rebuilding the team that is the pride of conservative, Castilian Spain.

He continues:

When Capello comes to write the account of his time as England manager the chapter covering January and February 2010 will be the pages to turn to first. Wayne Bridge's withdrawal from international football yesterday is only the latest blow in an England team that is disintegrating right in front of Capello's eyes just as the World Cup finals come into view.

There was qualification for the World Cup in September closely followed by injuries, affairs, broken friendships and broken marriages – as if, after two years of relatively plain sailing, the bucket has finally, definitively, been emptied on Capello's head.