IT is nice to know Fabio Capello is at last getting to grips with the lingo.

But not such good news for Setanta.

The fledgling pay TV company may have been able to block out some of the ‘We hate Setanta’ chants from disgruntled England fans but they could do nothing about Capello employing language once referred to as ‘industrial’.

Irritated by the number of times Wayne Rooney and Joe Cole left Emile Heskey isolated up front in the second half of their 2-0 World Cup qualifier victory in Andorra, the air-waves turned blue as Capello resorted to frequent use of the F-word.

Now he knows what the rest of us have been going through for the last decade or so.

Yet it was Capello’s expletive-deleted post-match criticism of Andorra’s defensive strategy — “They were playing for time even at 2-0 down” — that got up the nose of home boss David Rodrigo and led to the hosts’ one real counter-attack of the whole night. Even though it was only verbal.

But it did put the result in perfect context and dampen any misplaced euphoria England may have felt after ultimately side-stepping a humiliating banana skin and escaping Barcelona with all three points.

On being told of Capello’s disenchantment with Andorra’s unwillingness to venture out of their own half, Rodrigo said: “Tell Mr Capello that he can manage Andorra and I will take charge of England. And I’ll tell you one thing. If that had happened, England would have won by considerably more goals than they actually did.

“England may point to the scoreboard. But, on the basis of the players available to us, this was a moral victory for Andorra.”

The facts of the matter are that Capello’s England scored fewer goals against this same Pyrenean ski resort than Steve McClaren’s side managed 18 months earlier — and McClaren was practically run out of town for that.

Against a team of proverbial butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, a country ranked 186th in the world, England enjoyed 76 per cent of the possession and yet came up with only THREE shots on target — two of them goals.

In anyone’s language, industrial or otherwise, this is decidedly rank.

When the opportunity arises to fill your boots against teams like Andorra and San Marino, you have to take it. Especially when, as now, England are in a World Cup group where only one team goes through to South Africa in 2010 and qualification could well come down to goal difference.

While Capello’s team were fine-tuning all their old faults — a succession of aimless and ill- conceived high crosses to the far post at a time when Heskey was still on the bench — Croatia, even without the injured Eduardo, were still dispatching Kazakhstan 3-0.

Over the next 48 hours, no doubt, we will hear all about how England will raise their game when they themselves visit Zagreb on Wednesday. Well, they comprehensively failed to do so last time.

And few believe they will fare much better on this occasion. Here we have another car crash in the making. Capello is likely to make four changes to the team that started on Saturday night, with two-goal Cole replacing the hopelessly inadequate Stewart Downing on the left.

Another change will probably be Wes Brown for Glen Johnson. This says all you need to know about the current England set-up — the return of a player with a few too many holes in his game actually to stiffen the defence.

With Heskey rightly starting ahead of Jermain Defoe, we then come to the eternal Beckham conundrum. Seeing Capello is a man with an in-built default mechanism when it comes to taking even the slightest gamble, we have to presume he will click into safety-first mode and play old Golden Knackers from the start.

Again, they tried that last time in Zagreb, three at the back and five in midfield, and deservedly paid for their craven lack of adventure.

Surely, then, this is the time to give Theo Walcott another run. Yes, he faded after a bright start against Andorra. But, at the same time, the Arsenal youngster is the only England player with any recognisable pace to worry Slaven Bilic’s team.

In Vedran Corluka and Danijel Pranjic, Croatia boast two of the finest full-backs in the modern game. And there is little doubt Heerenveen’s Pranjic will be marauding down the left flank all night.

No place for Beckham

This makes it even more important that the man employed on the right of England’s midfield has the speed and fitness to get up and down that flank with him. Which tends to preclude Beckham.

Walcott would represent a gamble. But the attacking option he provides would take pressure off a defence that faces a battering from the combined skills and forward movement of Niko Kovac, Luka Modric, Ivan Klasnic, Ivica Olic and 20-year-old Ivan Rakitic.

This is such a good all-round Croatia team, it would be suicide to attempt 90 minutes of containment.

With a confident Croatia likely to engender in England all the old communication breakdown, formulaic high punts into the box, unforced errors and general mass hysteria that grips our glory boys when the going gets tough, Setanta would be well advised to remove all microphones from within spitting distance of Capello.