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CHAPTER TWO SVEN’S VERDICT (#ulink_96bf1d0c-665c-5046-81ad-2e24796d920f)
Sven-Goran Eriksson rejected criticisms of his ‘negativity’, but as significant as Rio Ferdinand’s suspension from Euro 2004, or the injury sustained by Wayne Rooney in the quarter-finals, was the absence of Eriksson’s assistant, Brian Kidd, who was recovering from prostate cancer. Kidd was a positive influence, an attack-minded coach, whose reaction to adversity was to throw another man forward. Terry Venables said of their time together at Leeds: ‘Whenever we were in trouble in a game, Brian would always say: “Let’s go 4–3–3.”’ When Kidd was not fit enough to travel to Portugal, he was replaced by Steve McClaren, who is much more defence-orientated. His inclination was to concentrate on organizing the back four, where he had mixed success. Three of England’s defenders – Gary Neville, Ashley Cole and Sol Campbell – shone throughout, but as a unit the defence operated much too deep, and proved alarmingly fallible at set pieces. That Kidd was missed is beyond question.
Eriksson felt England had been unlucky, and said the difference between success and failure was infinitesimal. A debriefing went as follows:
Question: What more do England need to win a major tournament?
Eriksson: Very little really. A little bit of luck would be nice. I still think we can win the next World Cup.
Q: Will you be around to try in 2006?
Eriksson: If it is the wish of the English people, or the FA, I will leave, but I don’t think that is the case. When I called the players together for a meeting the day after we lost to Portugal, I talked about 2006, and said I was committed to taking them to Germany.
Q: Were mistakes made in selection?
Eriksson: Absolutely not. The 11 players I picked were the best available, and the team will not change much before 2006.
Q: Are new players needed to take the team forward?
Eriksson: No, definitely not. This generation is still young, and can play at the 2006 World Cup for sure, and most of them in 2008. How old is David Beckham? Twenty-nine. At 31 he should be even better. Steven Gerrard is still only 24. It’s too early to talk about a new generation. Some new players will come in, but not many. Jermain Defoe will get a chance. He’s quick and a goalscorer. And we’ll have a look at Chris Kirkland in goal – if he stays fit for once.
Q: Before the tournament, England’s midfield was regarded as a strong suit. What went wrong?
Eriksson: I don’t agree that it did go wrong. All of them could have played a bit better, but their discipline was good, and they will be in the squad – the team probably – for years to come. In the quarter-final their legs went because we were chasing the ball so much. Steven Gerrard had cramp, and couldn’t do the running any more, so we had to put another player on.
Q: Beckham had looked more tired than Gerrard. Was his condition a disappointment?
Eriksson: When we went to Sardinia to prepare, we found that four or five players needed to work on their fitness. He was one of them. He worked hard at it, but maybe it was a bit too late. We have seen Beckham better, there’s no doubt about that.
Q: Why did you not bring him off?
Eriksson: If I could have changed one more player in the quarter-final it would have been Beckham, but they were all tired, and I’d made my three substitutions. Remember, Portugal had two more days to recover between games, and at some stage we were always going to pay for that.
Q: Why did England sit back and invite pressure?
Eriksson: Why didn’t we attack? It was the same as the Brazil game in Shizuoka. I wanted us to attack, but to do it you have to have the ball. If you don’t have it, you have to defend, it’s as simple as that. I like to defend high up the pitch, not on our 18–yard line, but if you come up against a team who are gambling a bit, you have to defend deeper. Also, if you are tired, as we were, you make more mistakes and keep the ball less, and it becomes very difficult. Playing defensively was not a tactic, not something we set out to do.
Q: So it was not all down to bad luck, England needed to retain possession more?
Eriksson: We work on that every time we have a practice session. We concentrate on ball retention in the warm-up, and also as part of the main session. I think we are improving at it, but Portugal, technically, are the best team in Europe, just like two years ago, when Brazil were technically the best team in the world when we played them. When I use the word technically, I mean they are best at keeping the ball.
Q: Why was there such a gap between the midfield and the strikers?
Eriksson: There’s a dilemma there. You want to play the ball forward as early as possible, but to keep the team together as a unit you need to play three, four or five passes and then get it forward. That gives time for the defenders and midfield to move up. If you just kick the ball long, then the strikers make their runs and the rest of the team is not there with them, and when they lose possession, there is that gap there. That happened too often, and it’s something we’ll have to work on.
Q: You seemed to be more emotionally affected than you had been at the World Cup.
Eriksson: When we went to the World Cup, we weren’t sure that we could win it, but during the tournament we started to believe that it was possible. At Euro 2004 I was always convinced that we were one of the teams capable of winning it. We didn’t and I’m sorry. I’ve lost many football games in my career, but to go out like that, on penalties, was awful. The difference between winning and losing was like this (he held up a thumb and forefinger, half an inch apart). We are so nearly there.
Q: What are the positives to be taken from the tournament?
Eriksson: Sol Campbell was a rock. Incredible. He could have been the match winner against Portugal – should have been. Ashley Cole also had an extremely good tournament. And then there was Wayne Rooney. We knew about him in England beforehand, but he proved to be even better than we thought, and he is a big name now, not just in Europe, but around the world. I think he will be a star of the World Cup in 2006, the European Championship in 2008, and way beyond that. If you are that good at 18, then by the time you’re 22 or 24 you could be phenomenal. Wayne is already one of our jewels, and he will get better and better. It is not just about his goals, it’s about how he plays football and the thought behind it. He’s always a thought process ahead in the positions he takes up, and the way he links up our game is just fantastic from one so young. With him in the side, it’s so much easier for us to play out with the ball. You can target him and he’ll keep it or get fouled, in which case he has got us a free-kick. I’d expected him to play well, but not at that level.
Q: What would be your abiding memory of Euro 2004?
Eriksson: The last three minutes against France I guess (when England went from winning 1–0 to losing 2–1). That or the last penalty against Portugal. No, definitely the last three minutes against France. That was awful – complete madness.
True enough – it was ‘madness’ reminiscent of the circumstances in which he got the job in the first place …
CHAPTER THREE THE VACANCY (#ulink_593fa38d-fb00-59e5-9ffa-2c6ed78fb6b9)
In hindsight it is clear that Kevin Keegan should have gone straight after Euro 2000, when the ‘Three Lions’ returned from the Low Countries with their tails lodged firmly between their legs. Tactical naïvety has become a clichéd criticism, trotted out ad nauseam on every radio phone-in, but Keegan was its personification. Against Portugal in Eindhoven, with England leading 2–0, he opted not to shut up shop and man-mark Luis Figo, arguably the best player in the world, with the result that England let slip what should have been a winning position and lost 3–2. Their hopes were resurrected with a 1–0 victory over the worst German team in living memory, but then a deserved 3–2 defeat against Romania, in Charleroi, where some of his choices were exposed as inadequate at international level, brought Keegan and company home before the competition proper had started.
After Glenn Hoddle had psycho-babbled himself out of the job, Keegan was portrayed as ‘the people’s choice’ by the Football Association. He wasn’t. That the label stuck was something of a triumph for the spin doctors at the FA, for in the opinion polls it was not Keegan but Terry Venables who had emerged as the clear favourite, both with the fans and with the professionals in the game. In the aftermath of Euro 2000, it was apparent that ‘King Kevin’ had feet of clay. The players liked him, but despaired at his lack of tactical nous, the public could see through his crass, British bulldog tub-thumping, and his employers were beginning to have their doubts.
The change should, and probably would, have been made before the start of the World Cup qualifying campaign, but for the absence of a suitable candidate who was available and, crucially, on whom the FA mandarins could agree. Venables, who had proved his worth in taking England to the semi-finals of Euro 96, would have had a second crack at the job but for the intransigence of Noel White, the influential chairman of the FA’s international committee. So Keegan was allowed to continue – a decision the FA was to rue.
By one of the quirks of fate that abound in football, the first game in World Cup qualifying saw England at home to Germany, the old enemy providing the opposition for the last international to be played under Wembley’s twin towers. The game would be followed by a second qualifier, away to Finland, four days later. Traditionally, the Germans were something of a bête noire, but there were no Beckenbauers, Netzers or Mullers in their millennium class, and England, who had just beaten them 1–0 in Euro 2000, should have had nothing to fear.
But that was reckoning without Keegan’s selectorial waywardness. For some unfathomable reason, he played Gareth Southgate, a central defender, in midfield, where this most willing and diligent of professionals was a four-square peg in a circular hole. England were depressingly poor, but Germany were not much better, and the only goal of a low-quality game was more the product of defensive deficiency than Teutonic inspiration. There should have been no more than token danger when Liverpool’s Dietmar Hamann stepped up to take a free-kick fully 30 yards out, but England neglected to form the customary defensive wall, with the result that Hamann was able to beat David Seaman’s slow-mo dive, low to his right.
England were booed off the pitch and Keegan was verbally abused by his erstwhile admirers as he made the long, disconsolate trudge around the perimeter, during which the extent of his inadequacy finally hit home. By the time he reached the sanctuary of the dressing room, he had made a fateful decision. It was time to quit. Disarmingly honest, he told the players and his employers, and then the nation, via television, that he was not good enough for the job. Somebody else should have a go.
In the dressing room, there was emotion and confusion in equal measure. Some of the senior players, such as Tony Adams and Graeme Le Saux, urged the manager to ‘sleep on it’ before finally making up his mind, but he was adamant. Adam Crozier, the FA’s Chief Executive at the time, and did most to try to persuade Keegan to reconsider. Recalling one of his worst days in the job, he told me: ‘Losing to Germany was an incredibly disappointing way to start the World Cup qualifying series. It set us right back on our heels. To lose your first game at home to your main rivals would be a major setback for anybody, but it was the way we lost it. The way we played that afternoon, we seemed to have gone backwards again.
‘From my conversations with him, I know Kevin could see that there were good young players coming through, who were going to improve the team over the next couple of years, and he wasn’t sure that he was the right man to get the best out of them. Kevin is a great patriot, and he had always had a great rapport with the fans. Not everybody will agree with this, but I felt it was a very brave thing for him to say: “I don’t think I’m up to the job.” The thing I didn’t agree with him over, and I told him so, was his timing. My view was that if that was the way he felt, the time to go was after the game against Finland, four days later. Quitting after Germany left us completely rudderless for the trip to Helsinki. Another false start in the second game, which was what we had, was always going to make the task of qualifying even more difficult for whoever took over permanently. So I felt Kevin should have stayed on for that one, and I certainly tried very hard to persuade him, as did a number of the players and Noel White, Chairman of the International Committee.
‘In the dressing room straight after the game we all tried – Tony Adams particularly – to get him to reconsider. Don’t forget, he was very popular with the players, and even after that game there was still a lot of love for Kevin and a great deal of support. They wanted him to stay, but there was no persuading him. Anybody who knows Kevin will tell you that one of his characteristics is that once he has made up his mind about something, that’s it. He won’t budge.
‘Crucial to his decision, I think, was the reaction of the fans as he came away from the pitch. He had always had that fantastic relationship with them; now they were booing and insulting him. In the dressing room, his mindset was complete. He wasn’t emotional, not at all. People imagine that he was, but he wasn’t. He came to a very clear-headed decision, and I think he made it with the best of intentions. He felt it was the right thing for his country. Even for the game on the Wednesday, his point of view was that the team would do better under someone else. He said to me: “I don’t think I can lift them [the players] because I don’t feel up there myself.”’
For Crozier and White, the urgent task that chaotic Saturday night was to find a stand-in to take the squad to Helsinki, less than 48 hours later. Crozier explained: ‘It wasn’t just that we’d lost, or that it was the last game at Wembley, but the England coach had resigned, so there was a huge furore about what had happened and where we went from here. In terms of the Wednesday match, there was only one sensible solution, and that was to get our technical director, Howard Wilkinson, to do it. Given the timescale [the England squad flew out to Helsinki on the Monday morning], it had to be somebody from within, and Howard had the knowledge, both of our players and of international football. So on the Saturday night, by about 7.30pm, we’d agreed that he would be in charge for Finland. I spoke to Noel White about it, and checked with the FA chairman [Geoff Thompson] to make sure that he was comfortable with it. But in the final analysis, our options were so limited that it had to be Howard. To have put someone in from scratch would have been asking the impossible.’
One of the more fanciful tabloid newspapers reported that Crozier had left the dressing room and telephoned Eriksson’s agent, Athole Still, to enquire about his availability. (An interesting, cosmopolitan character, who trained as an opera singer in Italy and worked as a swimming coach, TV commentator and journalist, Still got to know Eriksson in the mid-1980s when they met during abortive negotiations to take Still’s first football client, John Barnes, from Watford to Roma, who were then coached by Eriksson. A friendship was forged over the next few years and, when Eriksson’s first agent, the Swede Borg Lanz, died in 1993, Still replaced him.) ‘That was rubbish,’ Crozier said, laughing. What did happen was that before England left for Finland, Crozier formed a sub-committee whose brief was to draw up a list of candidates. As is his wont, he wanted to be seen to be proactive. The new manager would be his man.
The assumption was always that Wilkinson was a non-runner. As a manager of the old school, at Leeds, he had been good enough to win the last First Division title before the advent of the Premier League, and in those days he had confided that his driving ambition was to manage England. He had done it once before in a caretaker’s capacity, after Hoddle’s abrupt departure, but a comprehensive 2–0 defeat by France at Wembley did nothing for his credentials, and England’s goalless bore with Finland on 11 October 2000 merely confirmed the impression that the game had moved on and passed him by. The occasion was more remarkable for what happened before, and afterwards, than for anything that happened in the 90 minutes. The final training session before the match was witnessed by a group of English football correspondents and by two members of the FA’s international committee, all of whom were distinctly unimpressed. The journalists noticed that England’s game plan seemed to revolve around hitting long balls, right to left, for Emile Heskey to knock down. The FA kingmakers noted that Wilkinson’s man-management methods left as much to be desired as his tactics. Watching him bark out orders via a microphone headset, one said to the other: ‘We’ve no chance of winning here, he’s lecturing international footballers like schoolboys.’ As if to reinforce the point, two of the senior professionals present, Stuart Pearce and Teddy Sheringham, exchanged horrified looks behind Wilkinson’s back.
The poverty of England’s performance in the Olympic stadium, and a table which showed them bottom, with one point and Germany top with six, moved one reporter to enquire whether it might be better to forget about qualifying for Japan and Korea, and use the remaining matches to bring on younger players with Euro 2004 and the 2006 World Cup in mind. Instead of the expected ‘each game is there to be won’ response, Wilkinson replied: ‘The possibility you’ve raised obviously has to be considered. In the interests of the long term, we could go into it [the rest of the qualifying series] picking a team that’s going to be there in four years’ time.’
But would the public stand for the jam tomorrow approach? ‘If it’s the right thing to do in the opinion of the professionals, they’ve got to. What’s the alternative? To keep doing what we’re doing at the moment, riding the rollercoaster? Quite frankly, I’m fed up with that. I don’t even enjoy the highs particularly, because every time we’re up there I think: “Here we go again, hold on to the bar because we’ll be going down any moment.” No, the real alternative is to go in with realistic expectations and to outline clearly to the players what is expected of them. We’ve got to make sure that their expectations are realistic, and that they don’t fall into the trap of trying to achieve what you lot [the media] set out in your agenda.’
Any slender chance Wilkinson might have had of getting the job on a permanent basis disappeared in this puff of pomposity. Abandon the World Cup, and a lucrative ride on the gravy train? This was heresy at the FA. Crozier says: ‘I’m not sure Howard wanted it, and the general feeling among the sub-committee was that he was never going to get it.’ There is conflicting testimony as to what happened next. Crozier would have it that he was immediately intent upon crossing the Channel, and the Rubicon, by appointing from abroad. Always the mover and shaker, he made all the running. ‘In the period between the games against Germany and Finland, I compiled what I thought was the right short list. Then I got the sub-committee together, and spoke to them about why I’d done what I had, and said: “These are the people who should be in the frame. For a job of such magnitude, I thought there were only five who could rise to the challenge.”’
Apart from Crozier, the head-hunting subcommittee comprised: Geoff Thompson (the FA chairman), Noel White (chairman of the international committee), David Richards (vice-chairman of the international committee and chairman of the Premier League), David Dein of Arsenal and Peter Ridsdale of Leeds United (both of whom represented the Premier League on the FA board) and Wilkinson (FA technical director). It was to these men, Crozier says, that he took his five potential candidates. He told me: ‘We talked a lot about the criteria for the job, and the most important one for me, right at the very top of the list, was a sustained record of success. At the time I said success internationally, which was misunderstood. I didn’t mean a record of success in international football, but success wherever the person had coached, across the world. Our man had to be successful, not just as a one-season wonder, but somebody who had really achieved, wherever he had been. We wanted it all – international credibility, tactical nous, man-management expertise and the ability to handle the media. We were looking for respect within the game and the right personality and cultural profile for international football, where the highs are incredibly high, the lows really low, and there’s a lot of time between games to fret over a bad result or get over-excited by a good one. We needed somebody who could cope with both extremes in a very levelheaded way. An emotional person over-reacts, and it becomes a rollercoaster existence. A calm personality is essential for international management.
‘I started with a long list, then broke it down and said to the committee: “There is a maximum of five who could meet our criteria and do the job.” At first I had people on the list who seemed to be good candidates, but then we thought: “Hang on, have they genuinely got all this?” The truth was that not many had.’ While others scratched their heads and dithered, Crozier drove the process forward. ‘I said: “Right, this is the short list. Before we go any further, does anyone disagree? No? Right, leave it with me, I will go away and look at this lot and find out everything I need to know about them.”’
Ridsdale remembers the sequence of events rather differently. According to him, he proposed Bobby Robson, who became the sub-committee’s first choice, ahead of Eriksson. The former Leeds chairman told me: ‘After the Germany game, on the Monday, Adam asked me, and the others, if we would form the sub-committee. We flew out to Finland and all the members of the sub-committee were there, apart from David Dein, and we thought it was a good opportunity to have our first meeting. We got together in the team’s hotel, and Adam produced a flip chart with a clean sheet of paper – nobody’s name was on it. He divided the board into four sections: English managers, non-English managers working in England, foreign managers and I think the fourth category was up and coming. On the English side, we had Bobby Robson, Terry Venables, Roy Hodgson and Howard Wilkinson, with a question mark against him. Of those working in England but non-English, we had Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and Gerard Houllier, the foreigners were Eriksson, Johann Cruyff, Marcello Lippi and Hector Cuper, and in the up-and-coming category were Martin O’Neill, David O’Leary, Peter Taylor and Bryan Robson. These names were solicited by Adam and written on the board by him. He said: “These are the categories, do we agree? Can anyone think of anybody else? No? Right.” So we went through the names, and everybody agreed that the ideal was an Englishman with another young Englishman backing him up. We had Bobby Robson and Peter Taylor as manager and heir apparent. There was a long debate about whether Terry [Venables] should be considered, and everybody agreed that if “New England” was to represent what the FA wanted it to stand for, we couldn’t discount Terry’s non-footballing reputation, whatever its rights and wrongs. The view was that, given what we were trying to achieve at the FA, we had to have a new beginning, and therefore Terry was not appropriate. That was unanimous. Whether it was fair to him or not, the baggage that came with him counted against him, and he was out of it.
‘Having debated all the rights and wrongs, we came out of it with two names: Bobby Robson and Sven. The agreement was that Adam would go away and seek permission from Newcastle to talk to Robson, to see if he was an option. We weren’t just talking about having him for one or two games, as was widely reported at the time, we wanted him on a permanent basis. There was, though, a suggestion that if Bobby would only agree to do it for the rest of the season, that would buy us time.’
Ridsdale, now Chairman at Barnsley, adds that Crozier was told: ‘If you go to Newcastle and get permission to speak to him, and Bobby says: “I’m not interested, but I’m prepared to help you out as a stopgap,” that would be better than nothing. Adam was sent away from the meeting with two alternatives to explore: Bobby Robson with a young English coach, or if not, Sven. After that first meeting, Bobby was in front of Sven. Everybody’s perception was: “Ideally, we appoint an Englishman. If not, we’ll go overseas.” Bobby only ceased to be the front runner when Newcastle were approached and said they wouldn’t release him.’
Crozier denies much of this and, in fairness, it is his version of events that ties in with that of Noel White. During the course of his research, Crozier said, he relied heavily on the advice of Sir Alex Ferguson, who had ruled himself out of the running for the job, but was willing to assist the FA in their quest.
‘I spent a lot of time with Alex, who was tremendously helpful. The night Manchester United played PSV Eindhoven in the Champions’ League (18 October 2000, seven days after the Finland game) he gave me a couple of hours at Old Trafford. When I went to see him I actually had a dual purpose, although nobody knew it at the time. I went to pick Alex’s brain about getting the right manager, but also to get his agreement to let us have Steve McClaren, his assistant, as part of our new coaching team. I wanted continuity, a long-term strategy, and I’d got the sub-committee to agree that we’d have three or four coaches under the manager, none of whom would be “The Chosen One”, as Bryan Robson was under Terry Venables, but any one of whom might emerge as the heir apparent over a period of time. For me, you see, there were two searches going on at the same time. Everyone thought I was looking for an England manager, but I was looking for a manager and his back-up. As it turned out, I ended up getting the support team first: Steve from United and Peter Taylor from Leicester, plus Sammy Lee, from Liverpool, for the Under-21s.’
When it came to the top job, Ferguson helped to point Crozier in Eriksson’s direction. ‘Having found out as much as I could about potential targets, and having listened to what expert witnesses like Alex had to say, I became absolutely convinced that Sven was our man after that first week. Alex was very helpful. We also talked about his players’ feelings about the England set-up. When they went back to Manchester United after international duty with us, what were they saying about us? From what they had told him, and from what he had seen, what did Alex think about our way of doing things? Where were we going wrong? That helped us to identify the sort of person we needed to fix it.’
Where Crozier and Ridsdale agree is that after the first week, Eriksson topped the wanted list. Crozier says the peripatetic Hodgson (ex-Malmo, Switzerland, Grasshoppers, Internazionale, Blackburn, Udinese etc) fell at the first hurdle, failing the ‘sustained success’ test, and Ferguson and Houllier were discounted on grounds of unavailability. So, too, was Wenger. Arsenal were naturally keen to keep the manager who led them to the Double in 1998, and the presence of Dein, their vice-chairman, on the sub-committee inevitably led to suggestions of a conflict of interests. The smooth poise for which Dein is renowned was disturbed momentarily when Wenger went on Sky TV and said he could not understand why England had not asked about him.
Before cottoning on to Eriksson, the media had made the Arsenal man the favourite for the job. So was he considered or not? Dein havered, saying: ‘He [Wenger] had gone public many, many times with the fact that he was going to respect his contract with Arsenal, and this was all about the art of the possible. Who could we get? There was no point wasting our energies on somebody we couldn’t get.’
When the sub-committee met for the second and last time, Eriksson was ‘a clear front runner’, Crozier says. The fans’ favourite, Venables, had disappeared off the radar. ‘If you measure his record against all our criteria, he didn’t stack up as well as Sven. It’s a subjective thing, and I’m sure there are people who still disagree, but if you are a leader, you have to back your judgement. The only time I got upset during the whole process was when some journalist friends of Terry’s wrote that we’d chosen integrity as one of our criteria specifically to rule him out, as if he didn’t have any. I found that upsetting for him because: (a) I wouldn’t want a friend to write that about me, and (b) it wasn’t true, so it was very unfair. We were looking for a broad spectrum of qualities, and my hunch was that Sven had them all – or at least more so than anybody else we were considering.’
Eriksson had been Crozier’s choice from day one. ‘That wasn’t the case with everyone on the sub-committee,’ he acknowledged. ‘Peter [Ridsdale] was always for Bobby, and initially other people had other views. At our first meeting some said we should go for Alex Ferguson, others Arsene Wenger, and there was a lot of discussion about Johann Cruyff. But at that second meeting, it became unanimous for Sven. I have to say I did corral everyone in, admittedly with David Dein’s assistance. It was a case of: “OK, is everyone now 100 per cent up for this?” They were.’
Ridsdale begs to differ again. ‘For Adam to say he forced the issue is wrong. We followed a very methodical process. And if David feels he initiated it, that is disingenuous, because he wasn’t at the first meeting. With the benefit of hindsight, Adam might say: “I always had this solution in mind, I led them there,” but I don’t think that’s true because we started with a blank sheet of paper, worked through all the possibilities, and everybody had their particular suggestions written down.
‘I don’t remember who first mentioned Eriksson – it might have been Adam, to be fair. I said Bobby Robson. I was saying that whatever we did, we should have the next man in place, so we wouldn’t have to go through the whole process again from scratch. The young bucks, maybe two or three coaches, should work alongside the main man, so that a ready-made successor could come from Peter Taylor, Steve McClaren or Bryan Robson, whose names all came up.’
Had Dein blocked any move in Wenger’s direction? Ridsdale was adamant that he did not. ‘People said because I was on the sub-committee, David [O’Leary] couldn’t be picked, which was a joke. He was on the list, but what had he done? He was never seriously considered for that reason. The same people said Wenger couldn’t get the job because of David [Dein], but it was at that first meeting that Sven emerged as our preferred foreign candidate, and David wasn’t even there. Wenger was considered, as was Alex Ferguson, but Sven was the number one non-English choice.’
Dein, away on Arsenal business, could have been contacted by mobile phone, but was not consulted either before or during that first meeting. Had he had any input? ‘No,’ Ridsdale said, emphatically. ‘Well, I know he didn’t speak to me, or to Dave Richards, Noel White or Howard Wilkinson. To Crozier … who knows? But Crozier never said: “I’ve spoken to Dein and we wouldn’t get Arsene Wenger.”’
For the second meeting, it was Ridsdale’s turn to be absent, on club business. Everybody else was present, Dein included. Ridsdale says: ‘All I know about what happened was from a briefing I had straight afterwards by phone, and that was to say that the second meeting had confirmed the conclusions of the first, and that thereafter Adam had the authority to go and try to get Sven.’
CHAPTER FOUR THE MOVE (#ulink_daa172b8-23ba-51ed-9021-fcdf6dff9e59)
Having agreed on the man they wanted, the Football Association’s problem was that Eriksson was under contract to Lazio, the Italian champions, who were still in the Champions’ League and intent on winning the European Cup. Naturally they wanted to keep the coach who had brought them the coveted scudetto. Adam Crozier, however, was not about to be deterred, and within two days of his first approach to the Roman club he had his man. He recalled: ‘My attitude was: “If you’re going to go for someone, do it properly. Make your move quickly, equipped with everything you need to get the business done. Get it done there and then, on the spot.” So I prepared everything I’d need to have with me when I got to speak to Sven about the job. I had analysis of matches, profiles of the players – not just the senior squad but the Under-21s and those coming through the youth scheme, right down to the Under-15s. I had videos of all the key games, statistics, everything. That enabled me to say to him: “Look, this is where we are, this is where we’re going, this is what we want to try to do.”
‘The other key thing when I made the move was to be able to offer our man a long-term contract. I’d got the people here [the FA] to agree to five years. If our objective was to win a major tournament by 2006, the contract should last until then. We needed stability, and five years provided the opportunity to train up people with the potential to take over.’
Crozier and David Dein, who has emerged in recent years as the most dynamic member of the FA board, flew to Rome by private jet on Sunday 29 October 2000, and prepared overnight for their meeting with Lazio and their coach the following day. Crozier said: ‘We met Sergio Cragnotti [the Lazio president], his son, Massimo, Dino Zoff [Lazio vice-president and former coach] and one or two others at the club’s training ground, at Formello. Sven was present for some of the time. Cragnotti senior was an absolute gentleman. Top class. We explained why we wanted to speak to Sven, and Mr Cragnotti said he was caught in two minds. Lazio had just enjoyed their most successful season ever, and were on a high, but he and Sven had become very close. A bond had been built up between them over a momentous season, and he didn’t want to stand between his friend and what he wanted. From our point of view, that was a great attitude – one not many would have taken.
‘At this stage Mr Cragnotti asked Sven to join us, and said: “Do you want to talk to them?” Sven said: “Yes, I would very much like to. This is the sort of job I’ve dreamed about, it’s something I’ve always wanted to try.” The second stage was for us to talk to him, and we did that there and then. Everything was agreed between us within 24 hours.’ Money was never a problem, Crozier insisted, and nor should it have been, with £2.5m a year, plus bonuses, on the table. In comparison, just four years earlier Terry Venables was on £125,000 a year when he took England to the semi-finals at Euro 96, and Kevin Keegan had been getting £800,000 annually. At Lazio, Eriksson earned £1.75m a year, tax free. ‘The third stage,’ Crozier said, ‘was agreeing with Mr Cragnotti the timing of the changeover. Initially, Lazio were unhappy about Sven leaving them before the end of the season because they were still in the Champions’ League, but eventually we managed to persuade them to meet us halfway. Sven would join us part-time from February, in time for our game against Spain at Villa Park. Sven wanted to finish on a high with Lazio, to repay Mr Cragnotti. He didn’t want to leave them in the lurch. There was that closeness between the two of them.’
Reluctantly, Crozier and Dein accepted that there was going to be an interregnum. Fortunately, they thought, they had just the right man to plug the gap. ‘We had a friendly coming up against Italy,’ Crozier explained, ‘and our initial objective was to get Bobby Robson as caretaker for that one game, with Steve McClaren and Peter Taylor backing him up. We were a bit surprised when Newcastle said no to that, and poor old Bobby was devastated. He really wanted to do it, and I don’t really see why he couldn’t have done so. After all, it was never the intention to have Bobby for more than that one game. What we said to Newcastle was: “Look, we don’t want your manager full-time because it’s not the future for us, but depending on who we go for [we didn’t want to give away who we were after], could we have him part-time?” Once we couldn’t get him, we made the decision to promote Peter and Steve. The reason for that was that Bobby was unique. He’d done the job before, and everybody would know that he wasn’t going to be our future because of his age. There was no point drafting somebody else in for one game, better to go with youth.’
Eriksson’s decision had been quickly made. He said: ‘My intention had been to stay another year with Lazio, but when the offer from the FA came, I immediately felt: “This is exactly what I want to do.” Such an offer comes only once in a lifetime. I never analysed the risks involved. I never thought: “I might not succeed.” On the contrary, I thought: “If I don’t accept, I won’t be able to sleep at night, wondering what I could have done with the job.” My intuition told me what to do, as it has done every time a new offer has come up. Of course it was a big change to take on England, but it was a bigger step, and an even greater risk, to move from the little village of Torsby and the coaching job with Degerfors to a club the size of Gothenburg. The step from Rome to London didn’t feel as big.’
He had not given much thought to being a foreigner. ‘Sweden had an English coach [George Raynor] in 1958, when they went to the World Cup finals. Why, then, shouldn’t a Swede take England? I read the book The Second Most Important Job In The Country, which is all about the England managers from 1949 through to Kevin Keegan. It showed that all of them were declared idiots at some time, even Sir Alf Ramsey, so I knew what to expect.’
It was as well that he was prepared. The FA’s decision to appoint their first non-English manager in 128 years of international football immediately polarized public opinion. John Barnwell of the League Managers’ Association and Gordon Taylor of the PFA objected strongly, on the grounds that the job should always go to an Englishman. Barnwell described it an ‘an insult’ to his members, and Taylor accused the Football Association of ‘betraying their heritage’. Their comments were widely reported, and, as tends to be the way of it, the newspapers split roughly on tabloid-broadsheet lines, with the likes of The Times and the Daily Telegraph open-minded while others were anything but. The Sun was at its most xenophobic, declaring: ‘The nation which gave the game of football to the world has been forced to put a foreign coach in charge of its national team for the first time in its history. What a climbdown. What a humiliation. What a terrible, pathetic, self-inflicted indictment. What an awful mess.’ Jeff Powell, in the Daily Mail, was outraged, fulminating: ‘England’s humiliation knows no end. In their trendy eagerness to appoint a designer manager, did the FA pause for so long as a moment to consider the depth of this insult to our national pride? We sell our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their year living in total darkness.’ The speed with which these opinions changed, once Eriksson’s England started winning, will be seen later.
The new manager was presented to the English media at the ungodly hour of 8am on 2 November 2000. The venue chosen was the Sopwell House Hotel, St Albans, which is convenient for Luton airport, and the time unusually early to enable Eriksson to get back to Rome (by private plane, of course) in time to take Lazio’s training that afternoon. His arrival at the hotel, which used to be Arsenal’s training base, was akin to a presidential procession. Surrounded by FA flunkies, who resembled an FBI close protection squad, his every step through the corridors was tracked by television camera crews, whose lights had him transfixed, like a startled rabbit caught in the headlamps of an oncoming car. The tabloid rottweilers were out in force, scrutinizing his every move and nuance. Much was made of the fact that he wore a poppy, with Remembrance Day in the offing. The Daily Express sarcastically (but accurately) observed that, coming from a nation of pacifists, he must have had it pinned on him by one of the FA’s spin doctors.
Once television and radio had finished playing ‘how-do-you-feel?’ softball, the press let fly with a few bumpers. Eriksson had little experience of English football, how was his knowledge? Could he name, say, the Leicester City goalkeeper, or the Sunderland left-back? He failed on both counts, and there were those (the author among them) who took delight in pointing out that the two players in question, Ian Walker and Michael Gray, should both be in contention for places in the next England squad. What about David Beckham? Was his best position on the right of midfield or in the centre? ‘Please don’t ask me that today,’ Eriksson said. ‘For sure he’s a great player, but I think I need at least a couple of practices with him before I decide that.’
What did he have to do to turn the England team into winners? ‘The most important thing, as always, is to create a good ambience within the group. If you don’t have that feeling, you will never get good results.’ Tactically, he was not prepared to disclose whether he would be playing 4–4–2 or 4–3–3. ‘But the players’ attitude to the game is much more important, and much more difficult to get right, than finding a formation.’ He was not going to discuss individual players before he started working with them. What he would say was that there was no question of abandoning the 2002 World Cup and concentrating on building beyond it. ‘I think you can do both. Of course you should plan for the future, but to give up on qualifying for the World Cup would be very stupid. As long as there is the slightest possibility still there, you should go for it. I think it is possible to win the group. Even second place in qualifying could get you a gold medal in the end. Give up at this stage? I don’t know those words. I never give up.’
Eriksson met every googly with a bat of Boycottesque straightness, hiding behind his unfamiliarity with the language when it suited his purpose, to the frustration of his inquisitors. Rob Shepherd, then of the Daily Express, whose nononsense directness has been the bane of many a manager’s life, turned to me afterwards and said: ‘Christ, to think it’s going to be like that for the next five years.’
It was announced at the press conference, almost by way of afterthought, that Eriksson’s number two at Lazio, Tord Grip, would be coming with him to England, as David Dein put it: ‘as his eyes and ears’. In fact Grip, unlike his boss, was released immediately by his Italian employers, and was scouting in England for three months before Eriksson finally arrived to join him. It was Grip, for example, who spotted, and recommended, Chris Powell, the 30–something Charlton Athletic full-back, who was the first rabbit to be pulled from the new managerial hat.
England’s next game, however, was the friendly fixture against Italy in Turin, where Eriksson and Grip were no more than observers. It was left to Peter Taylor to start the overdue process of rejuvenation with a young, forward-looking squad, and a team led by David Beckham for the first time. England lost 1–0, but gave a good account of themselves and Eriksson, who attended the match, was encouraged by the likes of Gareth Barry, Rio Ferdinand, Jamie Carragher and Kieron Dyer. His tenure was brief, but Taylor served England well by giving younger players the opportunity to catch the eye. The public liked what they saw, and Eriksson had a fair wind.
Meanwhile, events had taken a turn for the worse at Lazio. The revelation that their coach was keen to leave them for pastures new did nothing for the players’ motivation, and after the England announcement, on 2 November, Lazio’s form disintegrated. They won only six of 14 games, dropping to fifth in Serie A, and Eriksson saw his Champions’ League dream turn to ashes with defeats by Leeds and Anderlecht. By the turn of the year it was apparent that one manager could not properly serve two masters, and on 9 January 2001 Eriksson resigned at Lazio to devote his full attention to England.
The quick-break decision had been made in a petrol station, during the drive to training. It was then that he realized he was running on empty. ‘I just knew I couldn’t go on.’ Minutes later, he drove through the gates of Formello and told his players he was on his way. There were tears, and later an emotional meeting with Cragnotti. At a highly charged press conference, Cragnotti said the man who took Lazio to the title would always find a home back in Rome. ‘I want to see you back here, celebrating a long list of victories with England.’ To which Eriksson leaned across and told him: ‘Yes, and with the World Cup.’
Breaking his contract had cost Eriksson £1.3m, but money was the last thing on his mind. ‘I didn’t like what I did, but it was best for the club. Results in football are everything, and the results had been bad. It was better for Lazio to have somebody else come in and administer the shock that was needed.’
The Lazio fans had been resentful when the news broke of his imminent defection, but that same night he was given a standing ovation when he took his seat for a match against the Chinese national team, which was part of Lazio’s centenary celebrations. The warmth of the reception melted ‘The Ice Man’, reducing him to tears. ‘And believe me, I am not a man who cries easily.’ Cragnotti led the Roman salute, with the words: ‘It is only right that Lazio applauds the man who gave us so much.’
A delighted Crozier was relieved that the waiting was over. He remembered it thus: ‘Lazio found that once it was announced that Sven was going to be the England manager, the public profile that goes with that job made it impossible for him to continue in Rome. There were English journalists camped outside the training ground every day and, as a lot of managers have found, once the players know you are going, discipline and motivation is eroded. It was a difficult situation all round, and just before Christmas we all agreed that, even with the best intentions, the halfway house arrangement just wasn’t going to work. Events were conspiring to make it in the interests of all parties to say: “That’s it. Let’s move on.”’
CHAPTER FIVE THE MAN AND HIS METHODS (#ulink_74a0781e-f7f5-58fe-b6c4-4140d6fd82ee)
‘Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.’
WALTER BAGEHOT, Social scientist 1826–1877.
It ill behoves a newspaperman to say it, but the most perspicacious comment I have heard, or read, about Sven-Goran Eriksson’s public persona came from the BBC’s Head of Sport, Peter Salmon. Contrasting Eriksson’s detached, almost introverted manner with the rentaquote familiarity of his predecessors, Salmon said: ‘The interesting thing about the England managers that I’ve seen is that the closer we’ve got to them, the more difficult the relationship becomes. You’re no longer as impressed as you were in the days when they were still remote figures. The better we know them, the less we respect them. Eriksson has brought the authority back to his position. He’s rather mysterious, hard to get a handle on. We feel there must be a lot going on up there. We might not know what it is, but it has obviously got results.’ It was only when we got to know the man that he lost a lot of our respect.
Salmon’s theme was echoed by Gareth Southgate, the most erudite and articulate of all England players, who says: ‘The fact that we didn’t really know him is a tremendous strength for a manager to have. That distance brought him more respect. Because we didn’t know too much about him, and vice-versa, he was able to detach himself when he made decisions. He took those decisions purely on the basis of the players he saw and the form they were in. One of his strengths has been concentrating on performance. Because he’s from another country, the nationalistic pride of playing for England hasn’t been at the forefront of his thinking. We’re all very proud to play for England, that goes without saying, but that’s also true of every other country. Every team we face is going to be passionate about playing for their country, so you have to produce the quality to be better than them. He has been able to distinguish between the two elements, and I think these players are more comfortable with that than people were in the past.’
Eriksson was neither a ranter and raver, nor a John Bull patriot. ‘At half-time,’ Southgate says, ‘he won’t talk for maybe five minutes, until everybody has calmed down and got their thoughts together. As a manager, you need to get your message across in a short space of time, and flying off the handle isn’t constructive. He never shouted at us, but then I don’t think there’s been a performance where he’s needed to. He has a calming, relaxing influence that helps. If you get a manager who is agitated and not totally in control, I’m sure it transmits itself to the players.’
People who have played for, or worked with, him are among the best equipped to define Eriksson’s je ne sais quoi. David Platt, recruited by Eriksson to manage the England Under-21 team, comes into both categories. He told me: ‘In my two years at Sampdoria, playing for him, I knew I enjoyed his training, I knew I enjoyed working for him and I had massive respect for him, but when people asked me why, I could never put my finger on it. Now that he’s over here, and I’m working for him again, I think about it a lot, but I still can’t hang my hat on what it is that he’s got. I could eulogize, and come out with all sorts of things, but then you’d go to him and he’d probably say: “No, I’m not like that at all.” I don’t think he has ever consciously decided: “Right, this is the way I’m going to be.” It’s just the way he has evolved.
‘I think he gets his respect from his ruthlessness. He doesn’t come across that way, and nobody is ever frightened of him, but he does command total respect. Everybody understands that if you don’t do whatever he wants, or if you fall below his standards, he’ll have you out and lose no sleep over it. There are no favourites, no concessions made. He loved Roberto Mancini, but he left him out at Lazio, and doing it didn’t bother him at all. Sven is controlled, and in control, whatever he does. At Sampdoria, he never came into the dressing room at half-time angry. He was always calm, and if he did have a go at us he was always totally in control of his emotions.
‘Mancini came out with a good statement the other day, to the effect that things don’t annoy Sven. He’s an enigma in that respect. I really don’t know if it’s a conscious effort on his part, telling himself: “I’m not going to let this get to me.” It’s probably a characteristic he’s developed over his career. You can imagine the politicking that goes on within the FA, and sometimes it gets me stirred up. I find myself thinking: “What on earth is going on here?”, and it must be so much worse for Sven. There are obstacles put in his way that would make a saint swear, but his attitude is always: “Fair enough, I’ll come at this a different way.” Nothing seems to annoy him, or knock him out of his stride. He follows his own path, and won’t veer off it, come what may.’
The furore over whether Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate of Leeds United should be chosen for England after the Sarfraz Nejeib court case provided a good example of Eriksson’s single-minded approach. He wanted to pick both players, despite FA disapproval. Platt, who was party to the discussions on the subject, explained: ‘I warned Sven that if he picked them, there would be a media circus, and other people at the FA spelled that out to him, but his reaction was: “Well, I’ll deal with it.” Not “Bloody hell, perhaps I’d better avoid all that.” You can imagine other people, myself included, thinking: “Hang on, let’s work out the pros and cons here – where could this all lead?” For Sven, the court had administered justice, and now it was 100 per cent about football and nothing to do with what the reaction might be. If you present him with a major problem, he has the ability to absorb it and deal with it. There’s no panic, no “How are we going to get out of this one?” He’s very good like that. I think the politics he had to handle in Italy equipped him for just about anything.’
On the training pitch, Eriksson worked by the power of suggestion. ‘A good phrase, that,’ Platt said. ‘He would stand there while we were playing a practice match, and he might walk over to me, and then Attilio Lombardo, and say “Why don’t you switch?” It wouldn’t be a case of stopping everything and saying: “Right, now I want you to do this.” He’d just sidle over every now and then and suggest something. Players would do it, and if it worked it would become ingrained in their subconscious. With good players, that’s what happens – you don’t have to keep telling them over and over again. That way it becomes too robotic.’
A man of egalitarian principles, Eriksson does not hold with the concept of favourites, but Mancini came close to it, as did Jonas Thern, the multitalented Swedish midfielder who played for him at Benfica. Thern, recently manager at Halmstad, followed the same path, from part-time football in Sweden to the high-pressure environment of one of the most famous clubs in the world. In an interview for this book, he told me: ‘In Portugal, the country was different, the people were different and especially the football was different. It was more technical, and we trained much harder, as full-time professionals. In Sweden at that time, you had to have a job, as well as football, to make a good living, and I had been working for my father’s printing company in Malmo. In Portugal I went full-time, and found it hard work at first. Often we trained morning and afternoon.’
Thern’s mentor had been Roy Hodgson, who had signed him for Malmo. He says: ‘Roy and Bob Houghton, when they came to Sweden in the late seventies, made Swedish football what it is today. They brought English organisation to our game and a new way of playing. Instead of standing off and counter-attacking they pressed when the opposition had the ball. They introduced all the things I’d seen as a kid every Saturday when I watched English football on television. There was conflict in Sweden before that style was accepted, but after a few years even the most conservative Swedish trainers changed over to the new, English approach. Nowadays, Swedish trainers are brought up on the methods and style of play that Roy and Bob brought over. ‘Svennis’ [as Eriksson is known to friends and family] made minor changes to suit Swedish players better, and when those changes took full effect, he won the UEFA Cup with Gothenburg.
‘When we were at Benfica, they weren’t a really rich club, but they had enough money to sign good players, and they also had their famous name to trade on. It was quite something to pull on the shirt of Benfica, with all their history. I think we had a squad of 24, and every one of them was an international of some sort. You expected to win things with players like that around you. Svennis was good at bringing the best out of everyone and finding their best roles. He’s very clever at moulding players so that they fit together to form the best possible team. Stefan Schwarz [another Swede] was a good example. He got the best out of him, to the benefit of the team, at left-back, left-wing and centre midfield.’
Thern admitted that he was basing his own managerial style on Eriksson’s. ‘I learned a lot from Svennis, sometimes without knowing it at the time. The way to treat people, for one thing. Whatever the circumstances, whether they criticise or support him, he always tries to treat everyone the same. Also, he has an aura of calmness around him that he brings to his teams. He is a person you like to listen to because when he says something it is always interesting, always constructive and beneficial. As a player, he makes you feel confident. If you are worried about your form, and you go to him for advice, he’ll always be reassuring. He’ll say: “No problem. Everybody has their ups and downs, trainers as well as players. Just keep on working on what you are good at. I know that when you are in good shape, you’re one of the best.” After you’d been talking to him, you felt: “He thinks I’m one of the best players in Europe and he’s a top trainer, so he can’t be wrong.” In a couple of minutes he’d have restored your self-confidence. He’s very good at building that up, for his players and his teams.’
In common with every other player who has spoken on the subject, Thern had never seen Eriksson lose that famous self-control. ‘I never heard him even raise his voice in the three years I played for him at Benfica. But as soon as he came into the dressing room at half-time, you knew if he was not satisfied. It was a case of: “Oh oh, best to be quiet here and just listen.” He wouldn’t shout. He just stared at you and immediately you knew you had to play much better in the second half, otherwise you’d be off and dropped from the team. He didn’t have to say anything. That look of his said it all.’
