FA to step up hunt for new manager

The search for the next England manager will intensify next week with Football Association chief executive Brian Barwick set to move on to the next stage of finding Steve McClaren's successor.

By next week Barwick will have completed his consultations with 12 leading figures in the game and will sit down with Trevor Brooking, the FA's director of football development, to decide on their strategy.

It is expected the pair will draw up a small but select group of managers - even perhaps just one or two names - who will be approached to sound out how interested they are in the position.

The list of those to be whittled down is believed to include Jose Mourinho, Fabio Capello, Martin O'Neill and Jurgen Klinsmann.

After that, negotiations will focus on a favoured candidate and if talks are successful his name will be presented to the FA board for ratification.

The FA are determined to avoid the sort of beauty parade that caused such widespread dissatisfaction the last time around where a succession of candidates were interviewed, and McClaren was clearly not the first choice to be England manager.

They are emphatic they will not to be bounced in to approaching leading managers such as Mourinho or Capello with a job offer simply because they are popular choices, only to be left in the lurch again as they were with Luis Felipe Scolari in 2006.

Intriguingly, even managers such as O'Neill who have publicly ruled themselves out of contention already may get a call to see if that really is the case.

FA insiders say they would be surprised if McClaren's successor is not installed before the next international - the friendly against Switzerland on February 6th at Wembley.

Officially however, they insist that time is not a factor in the appointment process.

FA chairman Geoff Thompson, speaking at the launch of the 2008 UEFA Cup final design in Manchester, said: "We are determined to get the right man, at the right time. Brian Barwick has been charged with finding a manager to recommend to the FA board and is well under way with the process."

Barwick's consultations with people including  Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, John Terry, Steven Gerrard and several former England managers have not just focused on candidates but on what the FA can do around the national team set-up to give McClaren's successor the best chance to succeed.

Meanwhile, the meeting to arrange England's fixtures in their qualifying group for the 2010 World Cup has been postponed until the new year.

The meeting had been due to take place in Zagreb, Croatia, on December 19 but the six countries in the group will now get together at a date to be fixed in January.

England were drawn against Croatia, Ukraine, Belarus, Andorra and Kazakhstan.

The winner of the group will qualify automatically and the runner-up will hope to be one of eight teams who will progress to a play-off to make the finals in South Africa in 2010.