скачать книгу бесплатно
Thern explained: ‘Sometimes we’d start a game and wouldn’t be playing well and the opposition would be in command. He’d spot it from the bench and change things very quickly. He’d swap players around or change formation, from four in midfield to five. He was particularly good at knowing what the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses were. I remember when we were playing Porto once he said: “They’re a bit lacking here, on the left”, so we knew exactly where to concentrate our attacks. It sounds obvious and easy, but you’d be surprised how many trainers don’t brief their teams like that. I had a lot of big-name trainers after Svennis. Some of them were good coaches during games, some of them good only at giving instruction during the week. Sven is spot on at both. Overall, he’s the best I’ve played for.’
There had been no favouritism shown towards, and certainly no socialising with, the Swedish triumvirate (Thern, Schwarz and leading scorer Mats Magnusson) at Benfica. Thern had heard that Eriksson had been closer to his players at Gothenburg, but said: ‘I think the relationship has to be different in the professional world. For example, sometimes the Swedish players at Benfica would ask for an extra day when we went home for Christmas. He’d say: “I know you’ll behave if you have another day away from the club, but I can’t be seen to be favouring you because you are Swedish.” He always made a point of treating all his players equally.
‘Yes, he kept his distance, and I think that’s very important for a trainer in the professional game. You have to have a good relationship with your players, but you mustn’t get too close. Everybody has to know who’s boss.’
Peter Taylor was England’s caretaker before Eriksson took charge, and continued as part of the new coaching set-up until his work at Leicester City precluded further involvement. He says: ‘All of a sudden, I got the opportunity to be caretaker manager for a non-qualifying game, and decided that I had enough good, young players who could do well. I’m not sure Italy tried that hard against us, but we did do well. Sven looked at that game and saw decent performances without players like Campbell, Scholes, Owen and Gerrard, and thought: “We’re not bad at all.” We had a new, foreign manager, fresh to the players, who were starting to feel more together. We played Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in Italy, and everybody seemed to want to join in. For Sven’s first game, against Spain, we had a golf competition at the hotel, and again everybody wanted to do it. The team spirit started to look very good. Players changed from being low on confidence to being on a high, and they’re good enough to take some stopping when they’re like that.’
Of Eriksson’s personality, Taylor added: ‘They [the players] love his calmness. They like the fact that he lets people get on with their work. They like his sense of humour. They know he’s got a fantastic background. With a CV like his, he’d cracked it before he walked through the door. And they enjoy listening to him talk. It’s not complicated stuff, it just makes loads of sense to the players. The last time I was fully involved was Greece away [6 June 2001] and I’ve never seen such a confident group. We could have beaten anybody.’
Ruud Gullit played for Eriksson for two season at Sampdoria, and holds the man, and his methods, in the highest esteem. In an interview for this book, the 1987 World Footballer of the Year told me: ‘Milan wouldn’t play me regularly, they said I had knees of glass, so I went to Sampdoria in 1993 and played nearly every game. We came third in Serie A and won the Italian Cup. Nobody thought we had it in us, but the key was how Eriksson handled everything. I was really charmed by him. He’s a real gentleman. If you didn’t do what he wanted, or just did your own thing, his character meant that it would only affect you. He was so nice, such a good man in the way he treated people that it seemed rude, as well as silly, not to do what he asked. Because of the regard we all had for him, he never had to raise his voice to anyone. He would talk to you, one-on-one, in a very civilised way. He was genuinely interested in you, personally – not just what you were doing on the pitch.’
Juan-Sebastian Veron was first brought to Europe by Eriksson, who signed him for Sampdoria from Boca Juniors of Argentina. Veron, who won Serie A with Eriksson at Lazio, said the Swede was a more straightforward personality than Sir Alex Ferguson. ‘Eriksson is the same person inside the dressing room as outside. Ferguson will challenge the team with strong words, which is not Eriksson’s way. For me, the best coach is the one who is best at building a relationship with his players, so that they feel at ease, feel supported. When, sitting on the bench, there is more than just a coach but a friend too, you perform to the best of your ability. There aren’t many like that, but it is the mark of Eriksson.’
John Barnwell, of the League Managers’ Association, and Gordon Taylor, of the Professional Footballers’ Association, had both objected strongly to England’s appointment of a foreigner. Barnwell described it an ‘an insult’ to his members, and Taylor accused the Football Association of ‘betraying their heritage’. Within a year, they were completely won over. Barnwell now says: ‘His [Eriksson’s] achievements have been quite stunning. He has created an atmosphere of trust with the managers of the top league clubs and he has used commonsense to handle fragile relationships. As a result, not one manager in the country would say anything detrimental about his approach or his attitude. There’s a confidence and an understanding and a great optimism for the future.’
Taylor said: ‘One thing he has brought with him is an aura of stillness, which is particularly useful in moments of crisis. He deals sensibly with problems and instils confidence in the players. His philosophy is that you’re never as bad as they say, and probably never as good either. You just need to know what you’re aiming for. He’s got a good understanding of footballers, and he treats them with respect. There’s an element of Alf Ramsey in him, and that kind of loyalty to players can make the difference when it comes to the crunch. In those respects, he has been a very good influence.’
David Beckham, the England captain, says: ‘Mr Eriksson has a lot of experience, and the players realize that. He trusts all of us to do our job, and every one of the players has got massive respect for him. That’s a vital thing for any manager.’
Glenn Hysen, a championship winner with Liverpool, played for Eriksson at Gothenburg and Fiorentina. He says: ‘When we first saw him, at Gothenburg, he seemed such a small guy that we didn’t think much of him. But when you’ve listened to what he has to say, you have to respect him. And you really do listen to him. He goes around the players, talks to them, jokes with them. He always used to get changed in the players’ dressing room. I don’t know if he still does that [he does]. He’s such a smart person. He knows a little about everything, not just football. I don’t think you could find anyone to say anything against him.
‘As a coach, he’s not a magician. His coaching is nothing unusual: blackboard, paper, charts, diagrams of free-kicks for and against. But he’s good at seeing what’s going wrong during a match.
Eriksson had the ‘karma’ of a latter-day Gandhi. ‘He always keeps a level head, especially in a crisis,’ Hysen added. ‘And he knows that even when he’s happy, and things are going well, it can all be different the next day. That knowledge helps to keep him calm at all times.’
Eriksson was Glenn Stromberg’s mentor with Gothenburg, in the Swedish Under-21 team and at Benfica. Stromberg says: ‘He was always very calm – and for the full 90 minutes. Many managers will panic after 80 minutes if things aren’t going their way. Not Sven. He knows it is as easy for his team to score at the end as it is at the beginning. He is a very hard-headed man, he goes his own way and whatever he thinks is right, he will do it to the very end. He never panics, and players like that. I think England benefited from that when they played Greece in the last of their World Cup qualifiers. When I played for him, there were many games like that, when we got important goals very late, or held out when it seemed impossible. At Gothenburg, and again at Benfica, the players came to think of him as a lucky manager, and themselves as a lucky team.’
At Benfica, Stromberg says, Eriksson was the voice of reason in the dressing room, rather than Mr Big. ‘He didn’t behave like some sort of genius who wanted everybody to know how many things he’d won. Some coaches are like that, but he certainly wasn’t. Each week, he just told the team how he wanted them to play. By personal example, he was good at creating the kind of hushed, thoughtful atmosphere you need in the dressing room before important games. When Sven left Benfica in 1983, I left as well. I knew it wouldn’t be as good there without him. He is the best coach I ever had, in a long career.
‘I’ve seen so many coaches who have thought one thing at the beginning of the season, then panicked and changed when results didn’t immediately go their way. They change players, change tactics, change their style of play, and how often does it pay off? Sven is always calm, and always sticks to his method. His strength of character is his biggest attribute.’
Stefan Schwarz, the Swedish international midfielder, won the Portuguese league and cup, and was a European Cup Finalist during Eriksson’s second spell at Benfica. Schwarz told me: ‘He’s also a very good psychologist, clever at getting into his players’ minds. At Benfica in those days he had Brazilians and Russians, as well as Portuguese and Swedes to deal with, and because his ability overall was so impressive, he commanded the respect of them all. He never raises his voice, and I think that’s because he doesn’t need to. You can see when he’s upset from the look on his face, and if you don’t respond the way he wants you to, you’ll be the one who suffers.’
England’s goalkeeper, David James, is also a fan, his comments clearly including a thinly veiled criticism of Eriksson’s predecessor, Kevin Keegan, whose relentless mateyness could be wearing. He said: ‘Mr Eriksson is one of the quieter managers I have worked with, but he is no less effective for that. You don’t necessarily want the boss plonking himself next to you every time you sit down for a bowl of soup. As a tactician, I would say that he puts the team together like a jigsaw. Different players are treated as individual pieces as he pulls them aside for a quiet chat, telling Michael Owen, for example, to run from deep. That conversation will be in isolation, but when the team comes together, all the pieces drop into place. The training is certainly more serious than under the last regime, with most of the work related to real match scenarios. Mr Eriksson, though, is very careful not to make it obvious from day one who is in his starting eleven, in case the other players switch off.’
The man himself borders on the esoteric when discussing his man-management catechism. ‘The ability to make the right decision, and then dare to do the right things in all situations, is decisive at the top of the modern game,’ he says. ‘If one player isn’t up for it mentally, the whole team can collapse. When we have to give a performance – a competition, a match, some task at work – there are two forces inside us, pulling in different directions. One is ambition, and this is a positive force. Our ambition wants us to improve, to succeed, to attain the goals we have set ourselves. The other force is performance anxiety. This is a negative force. It produces a fear of failing, of making mistakes, of disgracing ourselves and, as a result, of not being accepted by others. These “others” might be our trainer, our teammates, the media, the supporters and, in everyday life, friends, neighbours and workmates.’
Eriksson works on accentuating the positive and eliminating this fear of failure, in the belief that mental strength is ultimately decisive. He reasons: ‘If you look at the top footballers, playing ability among many of them is very even. We can’t train more than we do, we’re already at the maximum that players can take nowadays, so it is mental differences which will decide who the real winners are.’
From day one at Lazio, and again with England, he had set out to break down the mental barriers that prevented players from going beyond the limit of what they believed was possible. ‘We often find it difficult, both intellectually and emotionally, to accept a sufficiently high level for our performance,’ he says. ‘We dare not pass our upper limit and reach our maximum. We have an inner mental barrier that stops us from succeeding, and have to break through the barriers we mentally erect that prevent us from using all our resources. For a long time, it was considered impossible to run a mile under four minutes, but then Roger Bannister did so, and it was not long before a number of other runners managed it. Bannister showed that it was permitted to run that quickly. Any breaking through such barriers has to be done first in the mind. The mind must prepare the way for the body.’
He invited the England players to try a mental exercise. They were to think about the phrases ‘I must’, ‘I should’, and ‘I’ve got to’. Then think of ‘I want to’, ‘I’ll have a go’, and ‘I can’. He explained: ‘It is fairly natural that we will not perform as well if we are forced to do something, rather than being free to do the same thing. It is also true that many sportsmen feel an unexpressed compulsion from their environment to reach certain goals. A typical example of the wrong type of thinking is the thought: “I mustn’t miss.” Close your eyes, relax and imagine you are in a match that is coming up. You see yourself on the pitch and you think: “Must, should, got to”. How do you feel? Don’t you feel that your personality withers and your mood sinks? After a moment or two, repeat the exercise, but think instead: “I want to”, “I’ll have a go”, “I can”. You immediately feel better, you’re practically raring to go.’
On less esoteric lines, Eriksson articulates his managerial style as follows: ‘First of all, the leader must be a complete master of what he is going to teach others, and he must also dare to be himself. Don’t try to be somebody else, or you will be found out very quickly. I would feel extremely stupid if I were to stand at the bench screaming and whistling at the players and the referee.
‘There must always be a target, or goal, and clear lines: “This is the way I want you to play football.” As a leader, you must be clear in what you say and explain everything to the group so that they really understand what you have in mind. When you have come that far, only one thing remains, and that may well be the most difficult one: having everybody in the team accept it. The important thing is having everyone understand that this is an agreement. Everybody must be moving in the same direction.
‘You have to be generous with praise, but in sport the big reward is the event itself. That’s where sport is simple and straightforward – win or lose, reward or punishment. You must set your goals high, but they must be realistic ones. You cannot go around promising titles if the material at your disposal is not good enough to do it. There is also the matter of fingertip feeling and intuition, which I think all good bosses have. When, as a coach, you have a team which is a goal or two down at half-time, you have to do something about it. Often it comes down to changing one or two players. It is a decision which seldom has a logical basis, but something has to be done. It does not always change the outcome of a game, but if it works, you will be called a genius.’
So is he a genius? He smiled at the suggestion. ‘A bit of modesty does not hurt. During the success of the past few years, more than once I have had to pinch myself. Then I say: “Hey there, Sven, you were born in Torsby.” By remembering your origins you get the proportions right in life.’
CHAPTER SIX AN ENFIELD TOWN FULL-BACK (#ulink_1a5fda5a-8053-5725-af46-270430f149b2)
Sven-Goran Eriksson spends nearly every Christmas at the parental home in Torsby, and if you saw the place you wouldn’t blame him. To visit this sleepy, snowy Swedish village in winter is to be put in mind of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas idyll, and to wonder how anybody could ever leave.
Sven-Goran was born on 5 February 1948, while the rest of the world was preoccupied with Gandhi’s assassination and the gathering crisis in Berlin. He was the first child for Sven senior, a 19-year-old bus conductor, and Ulla, who supplemented the family income with a variety of jobs, which took her behind the counter at the village newsagent and later to the local hospital, as an auxiliary.
Torsby these days is ‘New England’ in more ways than one, a postcard-pretty collection of clapboard houses surrounded by frozen forest and lakes. Originally a centre for iron production, drawing on power from the Klaralven, or Clear river, there is no industry to speak of now. There is a high-tech, state-of-the-art sawmill, owned by the Finns, and a small electronics plant, but the main employer is the hospital. With a population of 5,000, the village is the municipality for the northern part of the mostly wooded picturesque province of Varmland, which measures some 200 km in length. The region prospers on two tourist seasons, catering for all the usual winter sports and summer activities like canoeing and rafting. Lake Vanern, the largest in Scandinavia, is a magnet for anglers, while for wildlife enthusiasts there are elk and wolves in abundance. The wolf is Varmland’s official emblem.
It is against this bucolic background that young Sven, or ‘Svennis’ as he was quickly to become known, was raised. He grew up in a small, working-class home – so small that a lounge-diner-kitchenette was the main living room. A neighbour recalled: ‘They weren’t poor, but they had hard times. There were not many luxuries.’ It was a close family, in every sense, and the England coach still talks to his parents on the telephone every day.
Ski jumping, with a club called SK Bore, was his passion more than football when he was very young. He told me: ‘I learned from the age of five, and became quite good at it. With the club, I travelled all over Varmland, and into Norway, for competitions. It is a sport you have to start when you are very young, and have no fear. You’d never dare to have a go when you were older. The trouble was, when I was little they didn’t have skis for kids, we had to use adult ones. To get mine to the top of the slope, ready to push off, I had to carry them up one at a time. They were very heavy for a little boy, much too heavy to take two.’ In common with all the other children making their first jump, the diminutive Svennis started at 15 ft, before eventually working his way up to 65. ‘I loved it,’ he says, ‘but by the age of 15 I had to choose between ski jumping and football, and football won.’
The extremes in Swedish society made him a young socialist of the old school. ‘When I was young, I was far out on the left politically. I thought everything was unfair then. I was never politically active, but I was radical in my opinion.’ A friend from his teenage days said: ‘One of his dreams, when he was 19 or 20, was to move to South America, buy a plantation there and be nice to the workers, paying them well. He wanted to be a philanthropist.’
Charity had its limits, however. Sven’s brother Lars, eight years his junior, recalls how Sven always had to beat him at everything, irrespective of the age difference. ‘He was very competitive, even when I was little.’
Eriksson is a typical product of his environment, according to Mats Olsson, of the Torsby Tourist Bureau, who has worked with him in promoting the area. Olsson told me: ‘If you meet his parents, you will see where he got his calmness and laid-back character from. He’s a typical guy from around here. We have a saying that goes: “Let ordnar sig alltid, och om det inte gor det, sa kvittar det.” Roughly translated, it means: “Everything will fix itself, and if it doesn’t it won’t be so bad.”’ Eriksson knows the adage well, but while he accepts the translation, he prefers his own interpretation. ‘I like to think it means: “Don’t worry about things you have no control over,” which is a good way to live your life.’ He accepts that the pace of life is very different in Varmland, which is backwoods in more ways than one. ‘Their attitude is: “Never do today what can be put off until tomorrow.” It must be nice to be able to live that way, stress-free.’
Discussing old times with Eriksson’s parents is no longer easy. My predecessor at The Sunday Times, Brian Glanville, tells a story about two groups of journalists, tabloid and broadsheet, journeying together through the desert. Stumbling upon an oasis, the broadsheet boys fall to their knees to drink, only to spot the tabloid hacks relieving themselves upstream. The waters around Torsby have been well and truly poisoned by the redtops, whose foot-in-the-door intrusions in search of dirt at the time of Eriksson’s appointment have left the locals wary, and sometimes downright hostile, to English visitors. His friends are very, very protective, and in the case of Sven and Ulla Eriksson, reporters from their son’s adopted country are no longer welcome. ‘They have had a bad rap from your people, who came pestering them, knocking on their door uninvited and misquoting them to make their stories more dramatic,’ Olsson explained. ‘The English reporters made them almost reclusive.’
Sven-Goran told me: ‘If you go to see them now, they will welcome you, and give you coffee, but they won’t tell you much I’m afraid. They learned to be like that the hard way. It started as soon as the FA offered me the job. In the next few days they [the tabloid press] interviewed my mother, my brother in Portugal, my son in America, my ex-wife, who I hadn’t seen for six years, my ex-mother-in-law and my old maths teacher in Torsby. I want to be friendly, but I must try to defend my privacy and my family, especially when lies are written.’
Understandable this may be, but it is also a great pity, not least because the Erikssons have an interesting story to tell. In an interview conducted through a third party, Ulla said: ‘His [Sven-Goran’s] foundations are still very much in the Torsby values we have here. We care deeply about home, family, community, hard work and respect. I think he has carried those values with him all his life, and he takes them with him in his work. He tries to instil these values in his football teams. When he was young, it was always sport, sport and more sport. In the summer months we only ever saw him at mealtimes. He would go out in the morning and only return to the house to eat. Then he would be out again, always to the athletics track or football pitch. It was the same during the winter. Then it would be skiing, skating and hockey. He was best at ski jumping. He was never afraid of how dangerous it might be. Sometimes he would fall, but he was never seriously injured.
‘Sport always came first in his life, but he was good at school as well. He loved to read books anything from children’s adventure stories to Hemingway. I had to join a book club just to keep up with his hunger for reading. His school grades were good, but he always did best at sport. With most children, if you throw a ball to them, they will try to catch it and throw it back to you. Sven didn’t. He always wanted to kick it. If there was no ball, he would make do with anything, usually stones in the street. I remember dressing him up in his best clothes and a new pair of shoes for a day out, and while he was waiting he went outside and had a kick around. His shoes were almost ruined. When I told him off, he said: “You won’t be saying that when I’m a football star.”’
Sven senior says of his pride and joy: ‘Even when he was young, he had the sort of mind which wanted to analyse everything he did. He kept a notebook to record all his performances and chart his progress at every sport. He was a well-behaved boy. He kept himself too busy to get into any trouble. But we never pushed him into anything. We just wanted him to grow up a good person and to fulfil himself.’
Sven remembers watching English football on television every Saturday. ‘From when I was about 14, I sat down with my father every Saturday afternoon and didn’t move. It was the highlight of the week. When I was younger, I supported Liverpool.’ And now? ‘Today I support England, no club team.’
A visit to the young Svennis’s secondary school, Frykenskolan, found his old maths teacher, Mats Jonsson, happy to reminisce about his most celebrated former pupil, who lived just across the road, 50 metres from the schoolhouse. Jonsson, 65 but still teaching part-time, also coached Torsby when Eriksson started playing, and told me: ‘I had him in my maths class from 13 to 16. He was a clever boy. Very quiet and calm. He did everything I hoped he would do. He was always a pleasant pupil. I had a class of just over 30, and he was always in the upper half at maths.
‘He played football every day, it was always his passion. I was the coach at Torsby FC at the time, and when he was 16 he came to play there. He was in the first team at 17, but while he was always regarded as a good footballer at school, at club level he was never more than second rate. He wasn’t top class, never a remarkable player. But in football, as at school, he worked very hard and made the best of himself. At that time, we played with two markers and three players just in front of them, and he played on the right of those three. Today, you would probably call it right wing-back. It was a role for which he had to be very fit. It was a hard job I know, I’ve tried it myself – always up and back, up and back. Sven was always a hard worker, so it suited him. When he went on to play for better teams, it was as an out-and-out defender. Eventually, he was right-back in a 4–4–2 formation.
‘We had a good team when he was here. We were in the Third Division for three years, then we got relegated. I have to say we had better – players in that Torsby team, but he was always a very nice person to work with. When I told him to do something, he did it. You could always rely on him. As a coach, you have to say to a player: “You do that, and don’t worry about anything else.” If I taught him anything, it was that. The team worked in zones. We divided the pitch into zones, and in your zone, you were the boss. You might be needed to help out elsewhere, but first and foremost you had to be in control of your own area. It’s the same today, and I like to think I gave Svennis a little bit of grounding there.’ Eriksson smiled at the notion. ‘Mats was a nice man, but he knew nothing about football,’ he told me. ‘When he was in charge, we did a lot of running. That’s all I remember.’
Academically, the young Eriksson was a diligent, above-average rather than brilliant scholar. The school records are kept on file at the municipal offices in Torsby where, obliging to a startling degree for a Brit accustomed to bureaucratic bloody-mindedness, they searched the vaults and came up with Svennis’s exam papers. In his last year at Frykenskolan, aged 16, he gained very respectable grades in all subjects, doing best in maths, where he was marked AB. In Swedish language, an essay entitled ‘A Summer Place’ brought him a BA, and he gained the same grade in English, where a paper notable for its meticulous, painstaking writing included the translation of such portentous phrases as ‘He looked at me with pain-filled eyes,’ and ‘They’re going to X-ray him soon.’ The marker’s corrective red ink was in evidence only once, where Eriksson had written: ‘I finely [sic] knew my husband would bee [sic] alive.’ It will do his reputation with England fans no harm at all that his worst subject was German, where he got a straight B, one delicious howler seeing his word ‘Chou’ [sic,] corrected to ‘Auf Wiedersehen’.
‘My English wasn’t up to much, but I was good at writing when I was at school,’ Eriksson says. ‘I wrote a lot about Ernest Hemingway and his life. He was my favourite author. I also read a lot about the Greek philosophers. For a time, I wanted to be a writer – a sports reporter – and I thought about going to a sports journalism college.’
At Torsby FC – the ground is called ‘Bjornevi’, or ‘Bear Meadow’ – there is Eriksson memorabilia everywhere. There are bigger, better stadia to be found in non-league football in England, but the importance of this one to the local community extends way beyond its raison d’etre, and on my various visits there were Mothers’ Union meetings, IT for Beginners classes, and sundry similar extracurricular activities making use of the clubhouse facilities. On entering, the first thing you notice, immediately to the left, is an impressive trophy cabinet with more than 50 exhibits, central to which is a framed portrait of Eriksson in England garb. Closer examination reveals an autographed picture of the England squad, next to the Junior Football Shield 1999 and the Svennis Cup for Boys and Girls (10–13 age group). There are pennants from every club Eriksson has managed, a framed picture of Sampdoria, 1992/93 vintage (Des Walker to the fore) and, tucked away above a waste bin bearing the legend ‘Knickers’, Torsby team groups from 1966 and 1967, featuring a youthful Svennis, complete with luxuriant blond thatch.
When I called, nobody at the club spoke English, but the two old stalwarts present could not have been more helpful. By sign language, a man who appeared to be the caretaker indicated that I should follow him, and took me on a five-minute drive to meet one of Eriksson’s former teammates and best friends, Morgan Oldenmark (formerly known as Karlsson) who, together with his brother, runs the family printing business. Morgan (he changed to his wife’s surname because Karlsson is so common in Sweden), played in the same Torsby team as Eriksson before the latter left in 1971. Oldenmark, né Karlsson, was a striker, Eriksson played right-back. ‘Sven did nothing special, he just did his job,’ his friend recalled. ‘He was a good player for a coach to have. He did what he was told. He never lost his composure, or his temper, never shouted. He was a fine person. He was quiet, but he did have a sense of humour. He liked to laugh, and when we all went out together he’d enjoy himself and behave just like everyone else. He wasn’t always, how do you English say it? A goody-goody.
‘When a few of us went to Austria, skiing, we shared a room and he enjoyed himself all right. He was quite a good ski jumper, and when we were alpine skiing he’d never make any of the turns I made to slow down. He was fearless, never afraid of the speed of the downhill. Another time, when he was playing for Sifhalla, Torsby went on a trip to Gran Canaria – no more than a holiday, really and Sven came with us.’ To emphasize Eriksson’s sociability, Morgan produced snaps of the players on sun loungers by the swimming pool, the England manager-to-be clearly having a laddish good time. ‘Sven has always been a bit reserved, but when he knows the company he does like a laugh.’
The man himself tells a slightly different story. ‘Being in the limelight has never appealed to me. At Christmas [2001] I was invited to a concert, and a dinner for 70 afterwards. I arrived at the concert after it had started, and then said “no” to the dinner. I don’t like the celebrity thing. If I go to a party, I prefer to sneak in and stand in the corner. I don’t want to appear to be better than anyone else because I don’t consider myself special. My parents were ordinary working-class people, and that has definitely influenced me.’
Torsby Football Club have had their days in the sun, too, and were in the top division in Sweden as recently as 1997. In Eriksson’s time, however, they were never better than Division Three. His first ‘trophy’, in the year England were winning the World Cup, was a tin of coffee presented to each of the Torsby players promoted to that level. Oldenmark spoke nostalgically of the era when 3,000 would turn out for the local derby against Rannberg. ‘Nowadays, it’s 150.’
When the teacher, Mats Jonsson, stopped coaching the club, the local baker, Sven-Ake Olsson, known as ‘Asen’, took over, using flour on a baking tray, in place of the conventional blackboard, to school Eriksson and company in tactics. His old protegé remembers him well – and not just for football. ‘I used to work in Asen’s bakery to make some money,’ Eriksson says. ‘He was good at his job – and he knew his football, too.’
Now in his mid-seventies, Olsson remembers his doughboy-cum-right-back for his activities off the field, rather than anything he did on it. ‘Sven never drank much, unlike the others, but he had plenty of female attention.’ Eriksson’s first serious relationship was with Nina Thornholm, a beauty pageant contestant he met on his 18th birthday. After dancing the foxtrot at the local hop, he escorted her home. ‘Nothing more.’ They dated for nearly a year (‘he was always well-mannered, very proper’, Nina, who is now in her fifties, insisted), eventually moving into a flat together. Earning next to nothing from what was virtually amateur football, Eriksson supported them by working in the social security office, dealing with sickness benefits, where his colleagues included Mats Jonsson’s wife. It was not the life he wanted, however, and the relationship foundered on his sporting ambitions.
At 19 he did his National Service, spending 12 months in the Swedish Army. It was not a regime he enjoyed. ‘It was compulsory, so I had to do it, but it was not my sort of life,’ he told me. ‘You knew when you woke up in the morning what you’d be doing every minute of the day until you went to bed at night, and that’s extremely boring. I’m not one who likes having everything regimented and programmed for him like that.’
It was with great relief that on demob he resumed his studies at Gymnasium Amal, a college 160 km from Torsby, and then at Orebro, where he took a university course in sports science. It was at teacher-training college, at Amal, that he met Ann-Christin Pettersson [‘Anki’ to her friends], the daughter of the principal. They started dating in 1970 and married on 9 July 1977. Intellectually well-matched, and both keen to better themselves, they seemed ideally suited. Their first child, Johan, was born on 27 May 1979.
Ann-Christin says: ‘His determination to achieve what he wanted in life was the first thing that appealed to me, so you could say football brought us together. He never gives in. He knows what he wants and goes for it. I should know. I was his wife for 23 years.’
While studying at Orebro, Eriksson joined Karlskoga, where Tord Grip was player-coach. It was a bigger club, with a modern stadium, but it would be wrong to draw the conclusion that Eriksson’s playing career was taking off. Sten Johansson, a midfielder, played in the same Karlskoga team and told me: ‘In those days, we were always mid-table in the Second Division. Sven was not much of a player, and never our first choice right-back. He came here, from Sifhalla, when he was studying at Orebro. It was his choice to come – the club didn’t go out to sign him, or anything like that. He asked to join because we were nearer to his studies. The club paid him almost nothing. I remember him as a good team man, nice to have around. He left when Tord took him to Degerfors, as assistant coach. That was the end of his playing career.’
He was not greatly missed. Bryan King, the former Millwall goalkeeper, has been living and working in Scandinavia since the 1970s as coach, manager, scout and players’ agent. He has known Eriksson since his playing days, and remembers him as ordinary, at best. ‘In English terms, I’d say he was an Enfield Town sort of full-back.’ The man himself feigns offence at that. ‘I wasn’t much of a player, but as far as I know, Bryan King never saw me play.’
Before he quit, Eriksson learned a valuable lesson. Playing for Karlskoga in a 3–0 defeat against Helsingborg in 1975 taught him, the hard way, to what extent full-backs were dependent upon protection. In his customary right-back station, he was given a never-to-be-forgotten run around by a fast winger by the name of Tom Johansson. ‘It was like a circus,’ Eriksson admitted. ‘It didn’t matter what I tried, he just disappeared away from me. I said: “Damn, I need support,” but at that time full-backs were not given support. They were good times for attackers, because there was so much space behind us. That game at Helsingborg changed my mind about defensive tactics, and made me think about pressing the opposition.’
Johansson, now a plumber in Helsingborg, said: ‘I don’t remember much about the game, but I do know that I was faster than him, and got past him three or four times.’ Another Helsingborg player that day, Thomas Sternberg, is now the club’s director of sport. He said: ‘Sven wasn’t a player you would notice. He did nothing to stand out. He wasn’t playing at the top level, so nobody had heard of Sven-Goran Eriksson at that time. In that game, Tom went past him a few times.
‘I’d say there is no great connection between being a good footballer and a good manager. Often it is just the opposite, and the players who are medium-grade have more to offer as coaches. Sven was not a great player, but he is a fantastic coach. The strong mentality all his teams have is unbelievable. We are very proud of him. He has been away a long time, and we are waiting for him to come home. I hope it will be as Sweden’s manager.’
CHAPTER SEVEN ON BOARD WITH TORD (#ulink_7503dede-c460-5282-8707-a03c18d91075)
‘Tord Grip is my eyes, and one of the best coaches in the world. Nobody has the feeling for football in his blood like he has.’
SVEN-GORAN ERIKSSON.
Tord Grip is Eriksson’s assistant and long-time confidante. They have a relationship that dates back over 30 years, during which time their roles have reversed. When they first worked together, in 1970, Grip was the manager and Eriksson the worst player in his run-of-the-mill team of Swedish part-timers. Later, Grip ran Sweden’s Under-21s, with Eriksson his assistant.
Tord Grip was born in 1938, one of four children fathered by a woodcutter in the tiny village of Ytterhogdal. There was no professional football in Sweden when he left school, so he went to work in the local bakery. By the time he was 18, his father had branched out into haulage, graduating from a horse to a tractor to a truck, and he invited young Tord to join the business but the offer was rejected. ‘It was heavy work, and I wasn’t built for that,’ Grip says. ‘The bakery was perfect. I started work at six in the morning and finished at two, so I had plenty of time for football.’ All the training paid off. At 18 he moved from the village team to Degerfors, in the top division of the Swedish league. ‘For the first year there I carried on in the bakery, after that I went to work in a steel mill. There was no money for playing football, not even proper expenses. My father would drive me 450 km from where we lived to Degerfors, for which the club gave him £5.’ Grip, unlike Eriksson, was a top player, an old-fashioned inside-right who was to play for more than a decade in the Swedish Premier League, and win three international caps. He played for Degerfors from 1953 until 1966, during which time he had trials with Aston Villa, then under the management of Joe Mercer. ‘I came over and played three games for the reserves, but nothing came of it,’ he told me. Instead, he transferred to AIK Stockholm for a couple of seasons before becoming player-manager of Karlskoga, then in Division Two. He takes up the story of his fateful conjunction with Eriksson as follows:
‘We were promoted to the First Division, and then one afternoon in 1970/71 Sven came and asked me if he could train with us. He was studying to be a PE teacher at Orebro, just as I had done. He wasn’t specializing in football, as some have said. He wanted to be a PE teacher. We had a good team at that time, very close to getting in the Premier League, and I thought he’d struggle to get a game, but eventually he did get in the side. His technique wasn’t very good, but he worked at it on his own. He was the right full-back, playing immediately behind me, so he had to learn to defend, because I couldn’t. He always reminds me: “You told us that when we lost possession everyone should drop back and defend. Everyone except you, that is. You never did it.”
‘I was five years at Karlskoga. In 1974/75 I quit playing and became manager of Orebro, in the Premier League. Sven stayed and played on for Karlskoga, but then he got badly injured and didn’t play for a year. From Orebro I went back to Degerfors. I went back to work in the steel factory there, in their rehabilitation department, and also to manage my old club, who were now in the Second Division. I knew about Sven’s ambition, so I asked him to join me. He would have been 28.’
The manager immediately had the awkward task of telling his new recruit that he had no future as a player, and that he should concentrate on coaching. ‘Tord telling me that I would be better off if I stopped playing was not very nice,’ Eriksson says. ‘For a long time I regretted not fulfilling my ambition to play in Italy, but I’m over that now.’
Grip takes up the story: ‘He became my assistant, and we worked together like that in 1975. Then I got an offer from the Swedish FA, to run the Under-16 team and be assistant to the Sweden manager, Georg Ericsson. We qualified for the 1978 World Cup, in Argentina. Anyway, in 1976 Sven took over at Degerfors. He was in charge for three years.’ Two decades passed before master and pupil were to be reunited.
Degerfors, two hours’ drive from Torsby, is a frost-bitten town of 10,000 inhabitants, with a local football club not unlike Charlton Athletic. Runners-up in the top division twice, most recently in 1963, they have led a yo-yo existence since, but have forged strong links with the community, and consequently enjoy more support than they might otherwise expect. The clubhouse is full of merchandise – fleeces, T-shirts, mugs, schnapps glasses, hats, scarves etc – but noticeably short on Eriksson memorabilia, although there is an England 2006 calendar in the corridor, a relic of the failed bid to stage the next World Cup.
Degerfors have punched above their weight in producing 23 players for the national team, all of whom have their pictures in a make-shift gallery in the equivalent of the Liverpool ‘Boot Room’, where the kit man, Karsten Kurkkio, holds court. Kurkkio, 56, has worked for the club for longer than he can remember, in a voluntary capacity before he was put in charge of the kit. His room, he says proudly, is used by the coaches when they draw up their training schedules over coffee. Dashing hither and thither, he points to the snapshots of distinguished former players on the walls, where Olof Mellberg, of Aston Villa, was the latest addition. Pride of place, however, went to the legendary Gunnar Nordahl, possibly Sweden’s most famous player of all time. Born in 1921, Gunnar was one of five brothers, all of whom played at top level. A goalscoring phenomenon, the best of the brood began his career with Degerfors, before moving on to Norrkoping, whom he shot to four successive championships, with 93 goals in 92 appearances. Gunnar Nordahl won a gold medal for football at the London Olympics, in 1948, forming with Gunnar Gren and Nils Liedholm the celebrated Gre-No-Li trio. All three played professionally in Italy, where they made a huge impact, Nordahl joining Milan, and scoring a record 210 goals, collecting Serie A titles in 1951 and 1955. After a brief spell with Roma, he returned home to coach Norrkoping. He died in 1995. ‘He was our best,’ Kurkkio said, reverentially. ‘Sven-Goran Eriksson was not a good player. Tord Grip, on the other hand … Now he was good. He ran and ran.’
Kurkkio remembered Eriksson best for the innovation which saw Degerfors use a sports psychologist for the first time. The engagement of Dr Willi Railo started a collaboration which endured for 25 years. The guided tour of his dark domain complete, the kit man passed me on to Degerfors’s latest manager who, with ice on the pitch, had taken his charges inside for midweek training in a hall that doubles as a basketball arena. Dave Mosson is the sort of gnarled Scot you stumble across coaching in remote outposts all over the world. Going into 2002, he was in his third stint at Degerfors, having initially replaced Eriksson in 1979. Originally from Glasgow, he was apprenticed to Nottingham Forest, under Johnny Carey. By way of residential qualification, he played for the England youth team, but realizing early that he might not be good enough to make a decent career out of playing the game, he attended Loughborough College as a PE student, and made the move to Sweden after his fiancée’s father, who was on the board at Karlstad FC, invited him over for a trial. ‘I did quite well, and I’ve been here ever since.’ He has coached five different clubs in the Swedish First Division.
Mosson first met Eriksson as a player. ‘I played for Karlstad and Sven for Karlskoga, the neighbouring town, so we came up against one another quite a few times. He was a very ordinary right-back. You would never have noticed him in a game. He never kicked his winger or overlapped much. He just did his job as best he could. I don’t think anybody in those days admired how he played football, but he was very passionate. The game has always been a passion for him.’
The expatriate Scot was later in charge of the coaching course which set Eriksson on the path to greater glory. Was the England coach-to-be a natural? ‘Yes, I’d say he was. Some are, some aren’t. He was not the dynamic sort. Some use a lot of vocals and gesticular [sic] action, and are generally dynamic in the way they work. He was never like that. He did things methodically, talking a lot. He was always a good communicator. When he talks now, of course, people are more inclined to listen.’
When Mosson took over from Eriksson at Degerfors they had just missed out on promotion from the First Division. ‘Under the Swedish system,’ he explained, ‘it wasn’t enough to win your division, you also had to get through a play-off system to get up. Under Sven, they were in the play-offs twice, and were promoted once. I took them up straight away.’ At this stage, it became apparent that Mosson was holding something back. There was an ambivalence behind the praise. When I mentioned this, there was a pregnant pause before he decided not to reveal all. ‘I won’t tell you what Sven was really like, because I don’t think it would do anybody any good. Let’s just say that he’s very good at maintaining a front.’ No amount of prompting and pressing would persuade him to elucidate. Steering a determined course away from the dangerous waters he had ventured into, he went on: ‘Sven has learned to keep his cool, to stay inside his shell. Swedes do that. They are very polite and reserved. They don’t like to be associated with any diversionary activity. He lived his life here no differently to anybody else. He was a family man fairly early, marrying a girl from Amal, which is between Karlstad and Gothenburg, and quickly having a couple of children [Johann and Lina]. When he came on to the coaching scene, there was never any scandal. He just got on with life.’
Mosson was the first of many to hint that Eriksson had always been something of a ladies’ man. As a coach, Eriksson had always been an anglophile. ‘Right from his early days, Sven was heavily influenced by the English style of play, zonal defence and 4–4–2,’ Mosson said. ‘When he did his final coaching course over here, he had to submit a written paper, which I read, and that’s what he did it on – his adaptation of the English game.’ Bobby Robson was something of a mentor in the late 1970s, Eriksson journeying to Portman Road to study the methods and pick the brains of the manager who was rivalling mighty Liverpool’s preeminence in England with unfashionable Ipswich. Eriksson recalls: ‘I went to Ipswich on a Friday and watched the team train. I asked Bobby Robson if I could put some questions to him after training, and we ended up sitting in his office for two or three hours, talking about football. Fantastic. He didn’t know me, and I was no one. He asked if I was coming to see the game the next day, and if I had a ticket. I said I was going to buy one. “Well,” he said, “do you want to sit on the bench with me?” Can you imagine? I was sitting next to him and the game was being shown live in Sweden. Beautiful. He is a very special man.’
Mosson’s predecessor as manager at Degerfors, Kenneth Norolling, has also known Eriksson for many years, and says: ‘Tord Grip and Svennis were the first coaches in Sweden to take ideas from England. That’s where they got the 4–4–2 system and the flat back four. They took ideas from Bob Houghton [the Englishman who took Malmo to the 1979 European Cup Final] and Roy Hodgson, at Halmstad. There was a lot of discussion in Sweden around that time about how we should play, who we should follow. Tord was the first Swede to copy the English system, followed by Sven.’
Hodgson told me: ‘From 1974 to 1980, of the six Swedish championships available, Bob won three and I won two. Then Bob and I left Sweden [to go to Bristol City together] and there was a period of Gothenburg domination until 1985, when Malmo took over. All credit to Tord and Sven who were the first to hitch on to our bandwagon. To be honest, there’s nothing really new in the game. All of us, somewhere along the line, have looked at somebody who has done something and been successful and thought: “Yeah, that’s me, that’s what I want to do as well.” For me and Bob it was Don Howe and Dave Sexton. With Sven, it was probably more Bob than me, because he was the first.
‘Fair play to them, Tord and Sven had to fight a lot of battles because Bob and I weren’t popular in Sweden in those days. Not only had we anglicized their game, but we had locked out the Swedish coaches when it came to winning things, and they didn’t like it. We engendered great loyalty among our players, and it became a bit of a war between the Halmstad–Malmo faction and the rest of Sweden, including the football federation and the media. Tord and Sven aligned themselves with us, the group that was under fire, which can’t have been easy. But then, when they did it our way and gained their own success, our methods became popular everywhere because it was no longer the English who were doing it. In 1979, though, there were only three clubs playing with a back four, zonally, and pressurizing: Bob’s, mine and Sven’s. All the others were still playing the German way, man for man.
‘The national coach was a guy called Lars Arnesen, and he was one of the bastions of anti-British feeling. “This is not the right way to play,” he said. “It stifles initiative and turns players into robots.” All the old claptrap. But the national team had a strong contingent of Sven’s Gothenburg players, and they went to Arnesen and told him: “We’ve had enough of this system of yours. The way Gothenburg play is the way we should, too.”
‘I got to know Sven and Tord in 1979 and 1980, and felt an affinity with them because they’d had the courage to go with us. Other Swedish coaches were distancing themselves from us, but Sven and Tord said: “No, this is good football, this is the way football should be played. It’s how we’re going to play.” Tord took over the national Under–21 team, with Sven as his assistant, and they played the English way while the seniors were still sticking to their guns. I know they came under all sorts of pressure, but they stood up to the criticism, and I think the experience probably did Sven good. Taking on a fight like that prepared him for what happened later at Benfica, and in Italy.’
Grip told me: ‘When Sven started to work for me at Degerfors, I was the one with the experience in coaching and management. I was ahead of him in that respect, so I suppose I helped him to learn how to organize a team. At that time, a lot of coaches in Sweden were learning new ways. It was a period when we were starting to update our methods. It was an exciting time – a time of constant improvement. We took a lot, including our playing style, from England. The physical requirements we had already. There is not much else to think about in Sweden during the winter! Our strength was always our strength. It was when the other countries caught up with our fitness levels that we had to improve our organization. In Sweden, we’ve never been great technically, so we had to organize our teams cleverly and work hard to compensate. We did that.’
After Grip had left, Eriksson took Degerfors to the Third Division championship in his first season in management. The play-off system, involving four regional winners, was known as the Kval. At the end of 1976, Degerfors lost all three games, and were not promoted. In 1977, they did marginally better when, having won the league again, they took only two points from three matches in the Kval. In 1978 they made it third time lucky, winning the Third Division, by five points from Karlskoga, and all three games in the play-offs to go up to Division Two (North).
Eriksson attributed the decisive improvement to the work of Willi Railo. He says: ‘My team always played well in the Kval, but when it came to the play-off, we’d mess up. At my invitation, Willi came and worked with us for one whole day. He made a cassette for individual players to listen to so that they could practise mental training on their own. We even stopped the bus on the way to the match so that they could use their cassettes to prepare mentally. We won the play-off and went up.’
People were starting to take notice.
CHAPTER EIGHT INTO THE BIG TIME (#ulink_26c00703-5c3e-5e82-a18d-219163f4431c)
Gothenburg is where Swedish football began, and is the city that is most passionate about the game. The oldest club in existence today, Orgryte IS, formed there in 1887, as did the first governing body, in 1895. IFK Gothenburg, founder members of the league in 1904, have long been Sweden’s most successful and best-supported club, having won more championships than any other. When Sven-Goran Eriksson, of little Degerfors, heard they wanted to speak to him in 1979, he assumed that if there was a job on offer it would be with the youth team. He was wrong. At 34, Svennis had arrived in the big time.
Sven Carlsson was the finance director on the Gothenburg board at the time of the appointment. How had they identified Eriksson in the obscurity of the lower divisions? ‘It was well known that we were looking for a trainer, and Sven-Goran was recommended to us as one who was particularly good at youth development,’ Carlsson told me. ‘So the club president, Bertil Westblad, called him and he came to speak to us. We liked him straight away, and he agreed to take the job.’
It could have been one of the shortest appointments on record. After losing each of his first three games in charge, Eriksson called a team meeting and told the players, who had scorned the arrival of this ‘nobody’ from the backwoods, that if they wanted him out, he would go. It was a winning gamble, a turning point. He had confronted them and they admired him for it. So what if he was not the big name they had expected? They liked his style. One of the club’s best players was Glenn Hysen, the cultured central defender who was to win 70 international caps in a distinguished career which took him to PSV Eindhoven, Fiorentina (with Eriksson again) and Liverpool. Now retired, and back in Gothenburg, where he works as a commentator with Swedish television, Hysen says: ‘When Sven was appointed, he was a complete nobody. He walked into the dressing room, and all the players thought: “Who are you?” Here was this really shy man, who had been the manager of a little team called Degerfors, and now he was suddenly in charge of the biggest club in the country. We had never heard of him, as a player or as a coach, and it took us a while to get used to him and respect him. We made a terrible start, losing our first three matches that season, which was almost unheard of at Gothenburg.
‘In the third game we lost to a side newly promoted, and afterwards Sven asked the whole team if we wanted him to quit. He said he would walk away if we wanted him to. We all agreed that it was too early for him to resign, and decided we would give it time to see how things worked out. The rest is history. Sven won the UEFA Cup with Gothenburg, who became the first Swedish club ever to win a European trophy.
‘Now I hear he’s incredibly popular in England, but if that Gothenburg side had told him to go, his career might never have recovered. I don’t think he would have ended up working in a Volvo factory, but nor do I think he would have gone on to become a top manager if he had walked out of his first big job after three games.’
In 1978, Gothenburg finished third in the league, a distant seven points behind the champions, Osters Vaxjo. In Eriksson’s first season they were runners-up, just one point behind Halmstad, and they won the Swedish Cup, thrashing Atvidabergs 6–1 in the final. The championship had its most dramatic denouement for many years, boiling down to a last-day finish between Gothenburg and Halmstad, who were coached by Roy Hodgson. Halmstad were at home to relegation-bound AIK Stockholm, Gothenburg away to mid-table Hammarby. At halftime in the two games, when it was 0–0 in Halmstad and Gothenburg were leading (they won 3–2), it looked like Eriksson’s title, but Hodgson’s team scored twice in the second half to clinch it.
Hodgson remembers it well: ‘I’d been at Halmstad since 1976. In 1979 we led the league from start to finish, but we were lucky when we played Gothenburg at home in the autumn. We were top but they were having a good spell, winning games while we were drawing, and therefore closing the gap. When we played them, we were very fortunate. We won because the referee disallowed them what was a perfectly good goal. Our defence had pushed out, one of their strikers stayed in, and when the ball came to him he looked 20 yards offside. But what the referee and linesman hadn’t picked up was that it was a backpass from one of our defenders. That goal, had it stood, would have put them 1–0 up, and made it a very different game. Instead, we went on to win 2–1. We continued on our way, staying top but faltering a bit because we weren’t winning every game and Gothenburg were, and we came to the last day with only one point in it. We were at home to AIK, who were a poor team, and all we had to do was get the same result as Gothenburg. But if we drew and they won, they’d take the title on goal difference. They had a difficult away game, against Hammarby, in Stockholm.
‘We had a full house. The capacity at Halmstad was only 16,000, but fans were packed into our little stadium, waiting to celebrate a championship which we’d been on course for, really, from the first day. In 26 rounds of matches, we’d been top for 23. It was a big day for a small club – Halmstad had a population of barely 40,000 – and the players were nervous. We played very poorly in the first half, and should have been 2–0 down at half-time, but they missed a couple of gilt-edged chances, and we came in at 0–0. In the second half we scored a wonder goal after five minutes, and that settled the players down. We went on to win quite comfortably, 2–0, but I shall never forget that first half, when they could have put us away. Gothenburg had won as well, so we were champions by a single point.’
Runners-up and cup winners, it had hardly been a bad season for IFK, but not everybody was happy. Frank Sjoman, a respected journalist, wrote: ‘Eriksson has been at variance with the ideals of the fans since, like most managers, he wants results before anything. Before long, he had introduced more tactical awareness, workrate and had tightened the old cavalier style. The result has been that while Gothenburg are harder to beat, they are also harder to watch, and though they were challenging for the title, the average gate dropped by 3,000 to 13,320 – still the best in the country.’
Eriksson was changing from the traditional sweeper-controlled, man-for-man marking defence, to what became known as ‘Swenglish’ 4–4–2. He had taken the ferry across the North Sea to study Bobby Robson’s methods at Ipswich, and also journeyed to Liverpool’s Melwood training ground to learn from Bob Paisley, the most successful English manager of all time. Bobby Ferguson, then Robson’s assistant, said: ‘He [Eriksson] would stand by the side of the training pitch and note down everything. He never took his eyes off Bobby, and how he was organizing things.’
Glenn Schiller, a defensive midfielder who had come up through the youth team, recalled that it was almost a case of playing by numbers at first. ‘I remember it as if it was yesterday,’ he told me. ‘We worked all the time on pressing the opposition and running in support of the man on the ball. Svennis would place us like chess pieces on the training pitch. “You stand here, you go there,” and so on. It was hard work. The biggest problem was fitting all the pieces together and getting them all to move in harmony. The defensive part was the key to it all. When we were attacking, there was a fair amount of freedom to express ourselves, but we had to defend from strict, zonal starting positions.’
The new ‘Swenglish’ was deeply unpopular at first, but in fairness, the Gothenburg team that won the cup (needing extra-time and penalties to see off Orebro on the way) scored 29 goals in seven games in the process, which suggests ‘the old cavalier style’ was not entirely a thing of the past. Apart from the 20-year-old Hysen, notable members of that side included Torbjorn Nilsson, the most accomplished player in Sweden, who could scheme as well as score, 19-year-old Glenn Stromberg, an attacking midfielder who played in 24 of the 26 matches in his breakthrough season, and Olle Nordin, the team captain and engine room artificer.
Eriksson says of that first season: ‘During my first year, IFK were regarded as a rebellious bunch, and we suffered disciplinary problems, with too many bookings and sendings-off. But we overcame that by hard work, and in the end our behaviour was impeccable, on and off the field. We travelled a lot in the cup, and we used the trips to build a winning culture. Nobody moaned about waiting times, depressing airports or grotty hotel rooms.’
