Thursday night's news that Ashley Cole will be out for three months - that's the rest of the Premier League season - has caused England coach Fabio Capello a real headache.

You see, Fabio is a staunch believer in being fit and playing regularly for your team in order to qualify for international selection. The problem here is that Ashley is one of the best left-backs in the world.

Yet again, England seem destined to enter a major tournament with one of their key players not fully fit. It's happened to Becks and Roo, and now Cashley.

Surely this means Fabio will bend one of his own rules, should Cole need the full three months to recover from his ankle woe? And let's not even mention a Mr W Bridge of Manchester and a Mr J Terry of west London.

Richard Williams, writing in the Guardian, says just this very point.

In terms of the number of available candidates, England are not particularly well served on either flank of the defence. Capello will now be casting an even more keenly focused eye over Wayne Bridge, who missed two months of the season to injury and is presumably still recovering from the fallout of the John Terry affair. Given that Kieran Gibbs, the promising 20-year-old Arsenal defender, is already out for the rest of the season and that Stephen Warnock, highly impressive at Aston Villa, is currently injured, the spotlight will fall next on Leighton Baines, who is doing well at Everton.

None of them, however, has anything like the combination of experience and dynamism that characterises Cole's work, and the pity of his injury is that he has come right back into his best form this season, three years after moving from Arsenal in a contentious deal that sent William Gallas and a cheque for £5m in the opposite direction.

His injury is worse news for England than for Chelsea, who have Yuri Zhirkov waiting in the wings. The 26-year-old Russian was probably bought from CSKA Moscow last summer to replace a declining Cole. A fee of £18m certainly suggests that he was not acquired to be an understudy but the English player's renaissance has severely restricted his appearances.

Capello will know that, under Bobby Robson and Sven-Goran Eriksson, England had a history of regretting the decision to take key players in questionable physical condition to major international tournaments. For Ashley Cole, however, it might yet be worth making an exception.

And a little bit of fun for our second recommendation of the day. It's not often we'll look to Robbie Savage for words of wisdom, but we do just that in the form of his Daily Mirror column.

There was only one thing that I didn't love about Wayne Rooney's brilliant performance for Manchester United against Aston Villa on Wednesday night... he was wearing gloves!

It says it all about the British mentality that on an absolutely freezing night in the Midlands - which I covered for Radio Five Live - that most of the homegrown players on both sides were in short sleeves.

I've always been a long-sleeve man myself but not really for warmth. You don't feel even the bitterest cold when you're out there running around and trying to win the ball.

So I can't understand the new fad for players wearing scarves - and the one that really does my head in is when I see a player wearing gloves when he's got a short-sleeved shirt on.

Doesn't that defeat the object?