One can imagine Don Fabio with his record of ruthless serial success - after all this is a man who was fired by Real Madrid after winning La Liga last season – raising an eyebrow when that "milestone" was proposed by the FA. For the Italian winning is everything, second is nothing. And that’s it. It’s the mentality the FA has surely bought into – and bought into at a hefty price given Capello’s remuneration – so if a target is to be set it should be to win, surely.

Maybe the FA shouldn’t have bothered at all. A miss is as good as a mile and it’s hard to imagine the football federations of Germany or France, Italy or Brazil accepting that they had hit their "target" if they went out of a competition at the last four stage. But they emblazoned it as the first in their list of "major milestones" published as part of their "vision" for the future of the game.

It’s also a hostage to fortune as previous FA regimes – most noticeably that led by Adam Crozier who, in 2001, famously "tasked" Sven Goran Eriksson with winning the 2006 World Cup – have found. The suspicion is that only the English would set themselves up for such a fall. And only the English would do so without even setting that goal in the first place to actually win a tournament.

The saving grace for England is that they do have Capello. He supported the goals launched by the FA, as of course he would, and easily accepted the targets, as of course he would. He also launched impassioned pleas for the establishment of the new National Football Centre at Burton-upon-Trent and the appointment of a performance director to help with the national team.

The last two initiatives Capello will have deemed helpful. The first? Well, for him, it’s not a goal, a milestone or a target. It’s a failure. He only wants to win and is probably, in private, still shaking his head now at the FA.