Sven-Goran Eriksson

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A rebellious bunch? Schiller, now a football agent, wouldn’t go quite that far, but admits: ‘We came to be looked upon like rock stars, and after games we would all go out for a few drinks. I have to say we did have fun on all our trips.’ The downside of this good-time culture saw Schiller spend a month in prison for a drink-driving conviction, when he took his car in search of further refreshment after a party at home. ‘It was a long time ago, and I learned my lesson,’ he says. Eriksson said his piece at the time, but after that was steadfastly supportive, and welcomed the prodigal son back to the club immediately upon his release. ‘He is a very understanding man, and it was not a problem after that,’ Schiller told me.

That first season, Stromberg had been the major find. He told me: ‘Because I was only young, and already 6 ft 5 in, I’d had a lot of back trouble the previous season, when I was 18. But when Sven took over, he promoted me straight away to the first-team squad, and after a couple of months he put me in the team, in the centre of midfield. I couldn’t believe it, because I’d had so many problems with injuries and it took a lot of courage for him to do it. Straight away he left out some of the older players and gave the younger ones their chance.’

Of Eriksson’s early difficulties, Stromberg says: ‘When he arrived, he was unknown, which was one problem. Another was that he made us play in the English style – long balls and pressing the opposition all over the pitch. In Sweden, the national team and the bigger clubs were used to the short passing game, the continental way, and for a long time there was much criticism of Sven’s way of playing.’

The following season, Gothenburg dropped back to third in the league again, behind Osters Vaxjo and Malmo, while their performance in the European Cup Winners’ Cup was no better than ordinary. After making hard work of beating Ireland’s Waterford and Panionios of Greece, both on a 2–1 aggregate, they fell apart against Terry Neill’s Arsenal, and were trounced 5–1 at Highbury in the first leg, in March 1980. The North Bank was shocked into silence when Torbjorn Nilsson opened the scoring on the half-hour, but Alan Sunderland equalized within a minute, and after 35 minutes Arsenal were ahead, through David Price. Sunderland again, Liam Brady and Willie Young were also on target to make it a deflating night for Eriksson and his team. The return, in Sweden, was goalless, and remarkable only for a nasty scare for Neill and his players when their plane’s landing gear malfunctioned, causing their first approach to Gothenburg airport to be aborted.

It had not been a good season, and criticism was mounting. ‘Sven’s second season was more of a problem than his first,’ Stromberg says. ‘There was a big debate about our long-ball game, but we kept playing our way, and the national team stuck to theirs. Sven is very hard-headed, he will always keep to his way. By this time, the team and the whole club were behind him, but there was a lot of criticism from the fans and the press. Eventually, of course, everybody in Sweden went over to the English style. It all started just before Sven. Bob Houghton was at Malmo and Roy Hodgson at Halmstad, and they first brought that way of playing to Sweden. It became Sven’s way, too, and it brought good results for Gothenburg for the next ten years.’

For 1981, Eriksson strengthened his backroom staff with the recruitment of a new assistant, Gunder Bengtsson, and the team by signing three internationals. Sweden’s goalkeeper, Thomas Wernersson, joined from Atvidaberg, and Stig Fredriksson and Hakan Sandberg, defender and striker respectively, arrived from Vasteras and Orebro. Finance director Carlsson says: ‘When Sven joined us we already had quite a few good young players, so it was quite a good situation for a new trainer, but after a year or so he came to us with his proposals for improving the team. We backed his judgement as far as we could, depending on the finance involved. We were very impressed with the way he handled himself there. He would say to us: “This is a player I want to sign, but if we haven’t got enough money, I’ll accept that.”’

The consequent improvement was not quite enough, Gothenburg finishing second in the league again, four points behind Osters Vaxjo, and so far, Eriksson had done not much more than satisfy minimum expectations. Managerial take-off came with the annus mirablis that was 1982. That year, Gothenburg did the league and cup double and triumphed against all odds in the UEFA Cup, becoming the first Swedish club to win a European trophy. By this stage the erstwhile ‘Mr Who?’ had full and enthusiastic backing in the dressing room. Hysen says: ‘Even for a Swede, Sven was amazingly calm. In all the time I played for him, he never once raised his voice, and I can’t say that about any other manager. I used to imagine that he had a secret darkened room somewhere, and that he would go there on his own and shout, scream and kick the walls and trash the place. I know Swedes are supposed to be relaxed about things, but I thought it was impossible for a man to be that calm all the time.

‘On the other hand, Sven is also the best motivator I ever played for, and that is what you’d call a typical English quality. He treated everyone like adults, and they respected him for his honesty. If a player was dropped, Sven would take him to one side and explain his reasons. That approach made you even more determined to do well for the guy. He was an expert at man-management.’

Bengtsson, two years Eriksson’s senior, was manager of Molde, in Norway, when we spoke in April 2002. He told me: ‘We’ve known each other since 1975, when some mutual friends introduced us. I was player-coach at Torsby, Sven’s home town, before he took me to Gothenburg as his number two. We had a few problems at first, with results not going so well, but we had good players and eventually it all came right. Gothenburg had always been a team who played attacking football, but until Sven took charge they weren’t well organized, and so they hadn’t been winning anything. Implementing any new style takes time, all the more so when it is as unpopular as Sven’s was at first, but when results picked up, everything we were doing was accepted.’

Stromberg by now had developed into a key player, for club and country; indeed Gothenburg as a unit had matured nicely and were approaching their collective peak. They were still part-timers (Hysen was an electrician, Tord Holmgren a plumber), and were patronized by the European elite, but everybody was about to sit up and take notice. The first round of the UEFA Cup brought a routine demolition of Finland’s Haka Valkeakosi, and there was no hint of the glory nights to come when Sturm Graz, of Austria, pushed the Swedes all the way before going out on an aggregate of 5–4. By the third round, however, Gothenburg were into their stride, beating Dinamo Bucharest at home (3–1) and away (1–0), and when they eliminated Valencia in the quarter-final it was clear that they were a force to be reckoned with. Stromberg remembers the trip to Spain with much amusement. He says: ‘You have to remember that the club didn’t really have the money to compete at this level. When we played Valencia away, we didn’t have any directors with us. The club had severe financial problems at the time, and the four directors were all standing down. For nearly a month we had no administration, and when we went to Valencia there were no directors, just the Swedish journalists with us.

‘There was a formal dinner the night before the match, and we had nobody to sit at the table with the Valencia directors, so we took the club doctor, a radio reporter and the kit man. It was unbelievable, to see these guys eating with the people who owned one of the biggest clubs in Spain.’

The financial situation had improved by the time the semi-final brought Gothenburg up against Germany’s Kaiserslautern, who had just inflicted the heaviest-ever European defeat (5–0) on Real Madrid, and were therefore hot favourites. ‘We were getting 50,000 gates for the European games, and Valencia had eased the cashflow problem,’ Stromberg explained. ‘Everything really started to come together that month. We were saved, as a big club, by our European run.’ Again Eriksson’s game plan worked to perfection. The draw and away goal he wanted from the first leg in Germany shifted the odds in Gothenburg’s favour for the return, and a 2–1 win at home completed the upset. ‘At that time,’ Stromberg says, ‘I think we could have taken on almost any team in the world. We were very confident, we had a lot of good players and we had a method we all believed in. Everybody believed in the things we were doing, the way we were playing. In Europe, the teams we played were having a lot of trouble with Sven’s pressing game. They were used to being allowed to build up their passing from their own half, without pressure, but we started challenging for the ball very high up the field, and worked very hard at it. It also helped, of course, that there was a lot of quality in that side.’

The final was against another Bundesliga team, Hamburg, who were stronger than Kaiserslautern, and confident of winning with something to spare. Only once before had a Swedish club reached a European final, and the poverty of Malmo’s performance in losing 1–0 to Nottingham Forest in the 1979 European Cup Final was not about to strike fear into Franz Beckenbauer and company. Bengtsson says: ‘To be honest, getting to the final was a surprise, even for us, but there was a good feeling, a good spirit about that team – the best I’ve ever known. We also had an advantage. When a team like Gothenburg are coming up from nowhere, nobody really believes they are going to go all the way, and obviously it helps if you have a good team and nobody really takes you seriously. In the quarter-finals, nobody had said much or thought much about us, so Valencia expected to win. You could tell that. It was the same in the semi-finals, and particularly in the final. Nobody thought we could play as well as we did. We took them by surprise.’

Gothenburg were ten games unbeaten coming into the final, with their twin strikers, Torbjorn Nilsson and Dan Corneliusson, in prolific form. The first leg, in the Ullevi stadium, left the tie intriguingly balanced. Tord Holmgren’s only goal of the match, in the 87th minute, gave the underdogs a lead to defend, but Hamburg thought they could easily overcome such a slender deficit at home. ‘Nobody gave us a chance over there,’ Eriksson recalled. ‘Hamburg had flags printed with “Hamburg SV winners of the UEFA Cup ‘82” all over them. You could buy them before the game. I still have one at home.’

His own players certainly regarded themselves as rank outsiders, albeit in a two-horse race. Stromberg says: ‘An hour and a half before the game, Sven told us: “You know, we have a good chance here.” We all looked at him thinking “Yeah, yeah. A good chance. How?” He said: “We’re a team who score a lot of goals, and we’re always likely to get one. Then, if we get one, they’ll have to get three.” Sven reminded us that nobody had scored three times against us all season, and that got us thinking. We turned to one another with looks that said: “Yeah, he’s right, we do have a chance here.”’

Teutonic speculation focused on whether Beckenbauer would play and pick up the one trophy that had eluded him. Two weeks away from retirement ‘The Kaiser’ had only just recovered from a bruised kidney, and had been among the substitutes a few days earlier, for the 5–0 drubbing of Werder Bremen. Ernst Happel, Hamburg’s Austrian coach, said: ‘There is a possibility Beckenbauer will play, but there is often a hitch between theory and practice.’ Too true; the great man never appeared. Nevertheless, Happel still had three formidable German internationals – Manni Kaltz, Felix Magath and Horst Hrubesch – at his command. Victory would be a formality.

The trip had inauspicious beginnings for Glenn Schiller. ‘I’d forgotten my boots, left them in Sweden,’ he says. ‘Sven wasn’t pleased. He said: “The only thing you have to bring with you is your boots, and you can’t be relied on to do that.” He made me buy new ones.’ Keen to get out of the manager’s way, Schiller was sitting in the toilet as the final preparations were made. ‘I was starting on the bench, so I was in no great hurry, and I was sat in there reading the match programme, with all the adverts for Hamburg cup-winning souvenirs. You could see that they had taken too much for granted, and definitely underestimated us.

‘When I came out, I could hear the crowd yelling and the dressing room was empty. I was locked in. I was banging on the door, trying to get out, but nobody came, and in the end I had to climb over the door. I was probably in there on my own for ten minutes. Just as I got out, Glenn Hysen was injured, and Svennis was asking everybody on the bench “Where’s Schiller?” They looked around and told him: “He’s coming.” I was running around the track and was sent straight on, so you could say I did my warm-up in the toilet! I didn’t get to sit on the bench, I sat on the throne instead.’

Hamburg started urgently, seeking the early goal which would square the tie and give them the initiative but, against all expectations, it was Gothenburg who played the better football. The Germans were too hurried, making mistakes which were ruthlessly exploited. After 26 minutes Eriksson’s underdogs were ahead, Tommy Holmgren, the younger brother of Tord, breaking down the left and crossing for Corneliusson to score with a powerful shot. Hamburg’s morale nosedived, Gothenburg’s soared, and the issue was put beyond doubt after 61 minutes, when Nilsson, who was outstanding throughout, outran Magath over 40 yards before making it 2–0 on the night. The Swedes were now 3–0 up on aggregate with away goals in their favour. Hamburg needed four goals in half an hour, but were a broken team, and disappointed fans were streaming out of the Volksparkstadion when Nilsson was fouled inside the penalty area and Stig Fredriksson scored from the spot.

Stromberg says: ‘It was one of those nights when everything is just perfect. Torbjorn Nilsson, our centre-forward, was probably the best striker in Europe for two or three years around that time, but I don’t think it was down to him, or the midfield, or the defence. Everything, everybody, was just perfect. I remember Hrubesch turning to me during the game and saying: “You know, we could play you ten times and never win.” On our form that night, he was right. We were that good. Every player knew what to do, where to be at any given time. Throughout the 90 minutes, I don’t remember any player being caught out of position once. Sven had prepared us that well.’

After 4,000 exultant Swedes had acclaimed their heroes on a lap of honour, Eriksson said: ‘I’m the happiest man alive. I thought we might sneak it 1–0, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we could come to Hamburg and score three.’ Happel offered no excuses. The first goal had been crucial, fracturing his team’s morale, he said. ‘In the end, they could have scored four or five.’

For winning the UEFA Cup, the Gothenburg players received £50,000 a man on top of their basic salaries of £1,500 per month. Schiller immediately put a big hole in his bonus by buying a Porsche. ‘Glenn Stromberg bought one too,’ he said, chuckling at the memory. ‘We were the two single guys in the team, you understand.’

Eriksson was also in the outside lane. Suddenly all Europe had heard of ‘Sven Who?’, and Gothenburg couldn’t hope to keep him. But he had built a young team good enough to dominate Swedish football for the next five years under Bengtsson, who succeeded him, and to win the UEFA again in 1987.

CHAPTER NINE LISBON CALLING (#ulink_7fab60cb-1bf5-5d2c-87e9-313b46fc70ce)

At the end of the 1981/82 season, Benfica were looking for a coach to replace the veteran Hungarian, Lajos Baroti. The world-renowned Lisbon ‘Eagles’ had done the league and cup double in his first season, 1980/81, but second place in 1982 was not good enough for a club with stratospheric standards (winners of 30 championships since 1935, they had never finished below fourth), and he had to go. Gothenburg may be Sweden’s biggest club, but Benfica operate on a higher plane entirely. They have always been number one in Portugal, and were, for a time, pre-eminent in Europe, making five appearances in the European Cup Final in the 1960s. When they want a coach, they usually get their man, and so it was in 1982 when, impressed by Eriksson’s triumph with Gothenburg in the UEFA Cup, they sent a private jet to fetch him and offer him the job.

His first task was to change the players’ mentality. Eriksson explained: ‘This was a team who played well at home, with a lot of courage, but as soon as they had an away game it was a different story. It seemed that in the Portuguese league they had learned that by winning at home and drawing away they could win the championship. Their away matches in Europe were particularly disappointing. They didn’t want to run and challenge the opposition and kept falling back. In the first round of the UEFA Cup, against Real Betis, I lost my temper. We were losing 1–0, but the players were happy. Losing 1–0 there was OK because we would beat them at home. At half-time I was furious. “What are you trying to do?” I said. “Are you here to play football or not?” One of the players spoke up. “Sure,” he said, “this is how we play away from home.” So I said: “The pitch is no bigger here than it is at home, the grass is the same. If you can play football at home, you must be able to play football here.”

‘We turned the match around and won 2–1. I was able to change their attitude to away matches. They played with spirit away, too. The team’s self-confidence improved dramatically. From then on, Benfica always played attacking football, always played to win, home or away.’ Even by their standards, Eriksson’s start was extraordinary. After his first 11 league matches, he had a 100 per cent record, a maximum 22 points banked and just four goals conceded. Going into 1983, Benfica were still unbeaten and a new club record had been set – played 28, won 26, drawn 2, lost none, goals for 85, goals against 15 – when they eventually slipped up for the first time, losing 1–0 away to their arch rivals, Sporting Lisbon. Even that took a dodgy penalty, and Eriksson was characteristically sanguine in defeat. ‘The run had to end some time,’ he said with a shrug. ‘It’s no great catastrophe.’ Indeed it wasn’t, as Benfica had a comfortable four-point lead over Porto, who had the league’s leading scorer, Fernlando Gomes, in harness with Micky Walsh, formerly of Blackpool, Everton and Queens Park Rangers in attack. Eriksson’s strikers were Nene, an experienced Portuguese international, and Zoran Filipovic, a big, bustling Yugoslav. The other key elements in the team were Manuel Bento, Portugal’s veteran goalkeeper, Humberto Coelho, the captain and accomplished right-back who was to become the country’s most capped player, Diamantino, a goalscoring winger and the only ever-present that season, and Fernando Chalana, an attacking midfielder who six years earlier, at 17, had become Portugal’s youngest-ever international.

The fans, dubious at first about the appointment of a 34-year-old Swede, were eating out of Eriksson’s hand after his first 16 league and cup games had all been won. From ‘Who is this young upstart?’ it had become ‘So what if he is the same age as his goalkeeper?’ The first sign of a problem came towards the end of February 1983, when a club versus country row blew up before Portugal’s match at home to West Germany. The national team had played another friendly, against France, a week earlier, and Benfica and Sporting Lisbon, both of whom were involved in European club quarter-finals, strongly objected to their best players being asked to play six games in 17 days. Negotiations failed to resolve the situation, and on the eve of the international, the clubs declared that enough was enough, and withdrew their players’ labour. Of a total of 36 named by the manager, Otto Gloria, in his senior and Under-21 squads, 11 pulled out, including six from Benfica. Gloria, a Brazilian, who had managed the Portuguese team at the 1966 World Cup and Benfica when they lost the European Cup Final to Manchester United in 1968, now resigned, refusing to nominate replacements. ‘How can I work in this madhouse?’ he asked, rhetorically. But he did. The old boy was persuaded to change his mind, and sod’s law dictated that Portugal, who had been beaten 3–0 by France when at full strength, defeated the mighty West Germans 1–0 a week later with their reserves.

Midway through that first season, Eriksson made his first signing, going back to his old club, Gothenburg, for Glenn Stromberg, now 23. Stromberg told me: ‘I finished the season in Sweden and then joined Benfica. What Sven was doing took a lot of courage – from both of us. When I got there, he said: “Now Glenn, you’re going to take the place of the fans’ favourite player, Joao Alves.” He was a clever wide midfielder, a real crowd-pleaser, whose trademark was always to wear black gloves. There were a lot of people who didn’t believe their eyes the first time I played and Alves didn’t. At first, it was very difficult there. When Sven spoke to me in Swedish, all the other players would look at us and wonder what we were up to. So after a short time he said: “Let’s just try to talk only in Portuguese, even though we don’t know very much, first so that everybody can see that we’re one of them and second, so they’ll know what we’re talking about.” I think it was more of a mixing-in exercise than anything. He would have played me, whatever anybody thought. Sven was never one to be swayed by anyone else’s opinion. He thought me playing was the best way for Benfica to get results, and we had great results for the next 18 months. Alves still played for Portugal while I was playing in his place for Benfica.’

Stromberg had to wait what seemed like an eternity before joining the action. ‘I couldn’t play for a month or so when I first arrived’, he explained. ‘The clubs in Portugal were going to be allowed to play two foreign players at the same time, instead of just one, but the rule wasn’t changed immediately, as everybody had expected. They continued to permit only one, and there was a Yugoslav striker at Benfica, Filipovic, who was scoring a lot of goals and couldn’t be dropped because he was the only forward we had who was West European in style. He was tall, a very good header of the ball, and because of his tactics, Eriksson needed a guy like that up front. It was a frustrating time for me. In all, I was there for three months without playing. Then the rule change went through, we could play with two foreigners, and I played for the last three months of the season.’

Eriksson was tantalizingly close to winning the UEFA Cup with different clubs in successive years, Benfica losing their first European final since 1968 by the narrowest of margins. The competition was strong, with four English teams – Arsenal, Manchester United, Ipswich and Southampton – all going out in the first round, but Eriksson’s canny, cat-and-mouse tactics brought them past Real Betis, Lokeren and FC Zurich before they came up against Roma in the quarter-finals. The Italians, top of Serie A, and boasting international superstars in Falcao and Bruno Conti, had been good enough to put out Bobby Robson’s Ipswich, and were clear favourites. Benfica, however, won 2–1 in Rome, Filipovic scoring both their goals, then made it 3–2 on aggregate in the Stadium of Light, with Filipovic again on target. Falcao’s 86th minute consolation strike at least gave Roma the face-saver of an away draw. Benfica were through to the last four, where they needed the away-goals rule to overcome Romania’s first-ever European semi-finalists, Universitatea Craiova.

Eriksson approached the final, against Anderlecht, undefeated in 22 UEFA Cup matches, but that record went in the first leg against the Belgians, in Brussels on 5 May 1983. In their semi-final victory over Bohemians of Prague, two of Anderlecht’s goals were scored by Edwin Vandenbergh, their centre-forward, who was one of five Belgian World Cup players in a team coached by one-time record cap holder Paul Van Himst. Anderlecht’s strength was in midfield, where in Ludo Coeck, Frankie Vercauteren and Juan Lozano they had a unit that was the envy of most top clubs in Europe, but they were also well served up front, by Vandenbergh and Kenneth Brylle, the latter an energetic, incisive Dane.

For the first leg of the final, Benfica were well below strength. Nene was not fit enough to start, and had to be content with a place on the bench, Stromberg was suspended and Alves absent injured. The only goal in the first leg was an action replay of Anderlecht’s winner in the semi-final, Coeck turning cleverly to beat two defenders in the corner and finding Vercauteren, whose left-footed cross was buried by Brylle’s well-directed header. Any hope Benfica had of restoring the balance disappeared after 75 minutes, when midfielder Jose Luis Silva was sent off, for hacking down Brylle while the ball was out of play. Both managers professed themselves satisfied with the outcome. Van Himst said: ‘I’m not disappointed in the least with 1–0. Benfica are very awkward to play against. They work carefully and methodically to break up their opponents’ rhythm.’ Eriksson thought the final was nicely balanced. ‘We’re far from out of it,’ he said. ‘Before the game, I told people that a narrow defeat wouldn’t be a problem, and I haven’t changed my mind. Anderlecht are a good team, but so are we, and it’s still 50–50.’

For the decisive second leg, two weeks later, Nene and Stromberg were back, but now Filipovic was injured, and only on the bench. With just the one goal in it, there was everything to play for, and the match drew a crowd of 80,000 to the Estadio da Luz. Benfica were marginal favourites, but had an early scare when the Dutch referee, Charles Corver, disallowed a Vandenbergh ‘goal’ for offside. Humberto Coelho, taking every opportunity to venture upfield, volleyed a Diamantino cross into the side netting, and Benfica’s positive approach paid off in the 36th minute, when Chalana’s cross from the left was diverted to Han Sheu, who drove the ball high into the net. Overall equality had been restored – but not for long. Benfica relaxed, fatally, and three minutes later Anderlecht broke out of defence and a cross from Vercauteren was headed past Bento by Lozano, a Spanish-born midfielder who was seeking Belgian nationality. Premature celebration gave way to hushed foreboding in the packed stadium. Benfica were left needing to score twice to lift the trophy, and now Anderlecht’s decision to go in with an extra defender, Hugo Broos, and use Luka Peruzovic as a sweeper, paid dividends. Stromberg’s direct running from midfield, which had been a significant feature in the first half, was to no avail as his front men became enmeshed in the Belgians’ defensive web. Nene had a header saved from Carlos Manuel’s cross, and the introduction of the half-fit Filipovic was to no avail. He did manage to get the ball in the net, but from an offside position, and after successive European Cup wins in 1961 and 1962, Benfica had now lost their last four European finals.

At least domestic compensation was at hand. They won the league, by four points from Porto, and completed the double by beating the same opposition 1–0 in the Portuguese Cup Final. Two trophies and a European final in his first season – even directors who prided themselves in being the hardest of task masters were suitably impressed.

There was no runaway start to the 1983/84 season. Eriksson sold Alves, to Boavista, and signed Antonio Oliveira, a centre-half from Maritimo, to fill in for Humberto Coelho, who would need lengthy convalescence after a serious knee injury. This time Porto, spearheaded by the endlessly prolific Fernando Gomes, who had won the Golden Boot as the top scorer in Europe the previous season, with 36 goals, matched Benfica stride for stride. After their first seven league games, just two points covered the top three, with Benfica on 13, Porto 12 and Sporting Lisbon 11. After 13 matches, Sporting had dropped off the pace, but although Benfica had won 12 and drawn the other, Porto were still hanging in there, only two points behind. There would be no clean sweep of the honours board this time. Benfica were knocked out of the Portuguese Cup by Sporting and lost to Porto in the Super Cup.

Eriksson and his team had their eyes on a bigger prize – the European Cup. In the first two rounds, they made short work of Northern Ireland’s Linfield and Olympiakos of Greece. Then, on the eve of the quarter-final draw, Eriksson was asked who he would like to get, and who he wanted to avoid. ‘Ideally, I’d like Rapid Vienna,’ he said, ‘but I’d settle for anyone apart from Liverpool.’ Almost inevitably after that, Benfica drew Liverpool. ‘The worst possible opposition we could have got,’ was Eriksson’s reaction. ‘I rate them the best team in Europe, as they have been for the past decade. But we have to play them, there’s no escape, so play them we will, and we aren’t going to be afraid of their reputation or their ability. If we play well, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t beat anyone, even Liverpool. Other teams have done so. They lost last season to a Polish team, Widzew Lodz, and I know we are better than Lodz.’

Talking up the opposition was probably a mistake. The last thing the Benfica players needed was to be reminded of Liverpool’s strength. Stromberg explained: ‘It was a very difficult draw – all the more so because the Portuguese players had so much respect for English teams. They would rather have played Real Madrid or Barcelona – any of the south European sides – than a team from England or Germany. They were afraid of their physical football. Against Spanish opposition, the Portuguese always thought they could win, but not against the English or the Germans. That was a big problem in their heads.’

Nevertheless, Eriksson’s well-organized team defended assiduously at Anfield, where it was 0–0 at half-time, with Liverpool labouring to break them down. It took a substitution to do it, Joe Fagan replacing Craig Johnston with Kenny Dalglish, who had been out for eight weeks, and had played only two reserve games since fracturing a cheekbone. The class of ‘King Kenny’ was the vital difference in the second half, when Ian Rush headed home the only goal of the game from an Alan Kennedy cross. Fagan said: ‘It was a calculated risk playing Kenny at all, but it paid off. He gave us a little more skill and turned the game our way.’ Eriksson said: ‘Dalglish was brilliant. He is the same player, even after being away for two months. The away goal in Europe is very important, and I am disappointed we did not get one. It will not be easy for us in Lisbon now. Many teams play better at home than away, but not Liverpool.’

Prophetic stuff. Between the two legs, Liverpool signed John Wark from Ipswich, and the new arrival brought the best out of his rivals for a place, notably Ronnie Whelan and Craig Johnston. At the second time of asking, Liverpool were magnificent, although they were helped on their way by a maladroit piece of goalkeeping by Bento who, with nine minutes gone, allowed a header from Whelan to slip through his hands and then his legs. ‘We’d played well at Anfield, and really thought we had a chance at home,’ Stromberg said. ‘But then our goalkeeper made that bad mistake early on which meant we had to score three, and that was too much for us.’

After 34 minutes Liverpool made it 3–0 on aggregate, putting the tie well beyond Benfica’s recovery, when Dalglish exchanged passes with Rush and played in Johnston, who scored from the 18-yard line. Benfica had no option but to attack, and Eriksson sent on two attacking substitutes, Filipovic and Sheu. It was Nene, however, scorer in both legs against Liverpool in the same competition six years earlier, who reduced the deficit after 75 minutes, only for Rush to head in his 35th goal of the season and Whelan to make it 5–1 on aggregate in the dying seconds.

At least there was no hangover for Benfica. Instead they took out their disappointment on little Penafiel, who were thrashed 8–0 in the next league game. That weekend, it was announced that Eriksson had agreed a new two-year contract with the club.

Nene’s four goals against Penafiel was his third hat-trick in a month after scoring three against Braga (7–0) and another three at the expense of Farense (7–2). The 34 year old was to finish joint top scorer in the league with 21 goals, overshadowing his partner Filipovic, who was no longer a fixture in the side. A young Danish newcomer, Michael Manniche, was often preferred, and the Yugoslav didn’t like it. The situation came to a head before the league match at home to next-to-bottom Estoril, when Filipovic hoped to net a hatful, only to get word that Manniche was in again. Sounding off in the local press, Filipovic insisted he was the better player. ‘I have greater experience and technically I’m stronger,’ he said. ‘Also, his timing is often wrong when he challenges for the ball in the air. I understand that Glenn Stromberg has to play in midfield, and that it is between Manniche and myself for the other foreigner’s place, but I have scored six goals in six matches for us this season, and four of those have been the winner. So why does he play instead of me? I don’t understand it.

‘The coach wants us to play a much more modern style of football than Benfica are used to. Eriksson wants us to run off the ball, when in the past, in the Portuguese style, we tended to do all our running on the ball. Eriksson must think Manniche is better suited to this game, but to be honest, although we have been winning, we haven’t always been playing very well. I did well enough for Eriksson last season, scoring plenty of goals. He should give me a chance again.’

Eriksson’s reaction to this outburst was surprising. He played Filipovic against Estoril. What followed was just one of many instances that fuelled his reputation as a lucky manager. Benfica took the lead midway through the second half, with a Diamantino header, but Estoril equalized after 75 minutes. Then, with eight minutes left, Filipovic and the Estoril goalkeeper, Manuel Abrantes, went for a loose ball, Filipovic made his challenge fractionally late and was booked. No problem there, but he launched into a tirade against the referee, Antonio Ferreira, who sent him off. Eriksson had no more trouble from his erstwhile critic, who admitted he had blown his last chance. ‘It was my fault,’ he said, ‘but there was plenty of bad language from others out there, and I don’t see why he had to pick on me. For a comeback game, things couldn’t have gone worse.’

Benfica went on to win the league, for the 26th time, by four points from Sporting. The issue was decided on the penultimate day, when Chalana’s goal, in a 1–1 draw with Sporting, rendered the last set of results of arithmetical interest only.

Eriksson had verbally agreed a new contract, committing himself to the club for another two years, but the European Cup Final, between Liverpool and Roma, on 30 May found him in Rome. Nils Liedholm had indicated that he would be leaving Roma, and when Eriksson flew in for the match, the suspicions of the Italian media were aroused. He told an impromptu press conference: ‘I have a new, two-year contract with Benfica. That isn’t easily broken, you know. In fact, I haven’t even got a ticket for the game. Benfica applied for me, but we haven’t received a reply.’ Later, it transpired that Ann-Christin had been touring Rome, being shown luxury apartments, while her husband watched the final.

Eriksson now had had a change of heart, and told the Benfica president, a builder and property magnate named Fernando Martins, that he would be leaving, after all, for Roma. According to Eriksson, the president had agreed to sell Ricardo to Paris St Germain behind his back, which rendered their agreement null and void. ‘If you are going to sell my players without telling me, then I’ll go too,’ he said. Martins, furious, followed him to Italy to demand compensation from his new employers. Stromberg was surprised, ‘but only a little bit’, by his mentor’s decision to leave after all. ‘He had told me, one month before, that he was going to stay, but I could understand what he did. Benfica are a great club, they won the league every year, so they were always in the European Cup, but for a coach like Sven, Italy meant a lot more. Football in Portugal is very big, but there are only three clubs of any real size – Benfica, Sporting and Porto. The rest don’t mean much. Going to Italy, to train a team like Roma, was a dream for Sven. When I heard he was going, I went, too. To Atalanta.’

CHAPTER TEN ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME (#ulink_f4cbff33-9033-56e7-bfdb-ec6c0dfb204f)

Sven-Goran Eriksson could have come to England nearly 20 years earlier. In May 1984, Tottenham Hotspur were looking for a manager to replace Keith Burkinshaw, and the chairman, Irving Scholar, approached two candidates, one of whom was Eriksson. Scholar told me: ‘Sven was just about to leave Benfica. He said he’d had a meeting with the people at Roma, and that basically he’d shaken hands on a deal, although nothing had been completely finalized. His agent at the time was a nice chap called Borge Lantz, who lived in Portugal, at Cascaes. I approached him because Sven had come to my attention as being a young, bright European coach with a future. He’d been successful at Gothenburg, winning the UEFA Cup, and he’d done well at Benfica. I’d heard a whisper that he was ready to move on, and so I checked him out.

‘I’d just been let down by Alex Ferguson, and I do mean let down. We’d had a few meetings and a lot of conversations, and I’d said to him: “Look, when everything is sorted we’ll shake hands, and that’s it.” He said: “Oh yeah, I’m that type of bloke as well,” so that was fine. Or so I thought. Anyway, we had our last meeting in Paris. We’d agreed the contract, everything. All the “t”s were crossed, all the “i”s dotted, so I said: “Are you ready?” He said he was. We’d both made great play of this thing about the handshake. I put my hand out, we shook hands, and he said, “Right then, that’s it.” I thought “great”, but five or six weeks later I started to get the impression that he was going to let me down. It was when he did that I spoke to Lantz about Eriksson. He said: “Go ahead, have a word with him, here’s his number.” So I called Sven and he made it clear that he had given his word to Roma, but that if the move fell through he would be very interested in coming to England. He went to Roma, and the rest is history. It was a shame. It would have been interesting to have a foreign coach all that time ago. It has become the fashion now, but it would have been ground-breaking then. Nobody in England had heard of him in 1984. It was “Sven-Goran Eriksson, who’s he?” When I bumped into him in England just after his appointment, I reminded him of the Tottenham thing, and his face lit up. If only, eh?’

Having missed out on Eriksson and Ferguson, who stayed at Aberdeen for another two years before joining Manchester United, Spurs gave the job to Burkinshaw’s number two, Peter Shreeves, and it was another three years before Terry Venables became the European-orientated coach Scholar wanted. In March 2002, in reflective mood, he said: ‘My first two choices weren’t bad ones, were they – Alex Ferguson and Sven-Goran Eriksson. I wanted Ferguson because, like Eriksson, he’d been successful in Europe. He’d won the Cup-Winners’ Cup and blazed a trail in Europe with Aberdeen.’

On 8 May 1984, three weeks before the European Cup Final, the president of Roma, Dino Viola, agreed with Eriksson that he would replace his fellow Swede, Nils Liedholm, as coach. He was not the first choice for the job, getting it only after Giovanni Trapattoni, then at Juventus, had spurned Viola’s overtures, but however the chance came, this really was the big time. Italy’s Serie A was undoubtedly the strongest, most glamorous league in the world at the time, and Roma had won the coveted scudetto in 1983. In 1983/84 they won the Italian Cup, beating Verona in the final, and were runners-up in Serie A, two points behind Juventus, as well as losing only on penalties to Liverpool in the European Cup. Eriksson, then, inherited a fine team, which had two world-class Brazilians, Falcao and Cerezo, at its fulcrum, with the ‘golden boy’ of Italian football, Bruno Conti, who had just made his international debut, wide on the right. Other significant individuals included the goalkeeper, Franco Tancredi, who had played twice for Italy, left-back Aldo Maldera, who had 10 caps, midfielders Carlo Ancelotti and Giuseppe Giannini, both of whom were to have substantial international careers, and strikers Maurizio Iorio, Roberto Pruzzo and Francesco Graziani. Iorio, 25, had been the leading scorer in Serie A the previous season, while on loan to Verona, and was naturally recalled, while Pruzzo, 29, had been the league’s top scorer in 1980, and had scored a brilliant equalizer against Liverpool in the European Cup Final. He had six caps. The most celebrated of the front men was Graziani, 32, whose 64 appearances for Italy took in the 1978 and 1982 World Cups. Despite the talent in the team, however, Eriksson’s first season was thoroughly disappointing. Defensively orientated to a tedious degree, Roma averaged less than a goal a game (33 in 34) in finishing a poor seventh in the league, and got no further than the last eight of the Cup-Winners’ Cup, where they were eliminated by Bayern Munich, for whom Lothar Matthaus was at his peerless best.

In mitigation, Eriksson’s entry into the Machiavellian world of Italian football was by no means straightforward. For a start, he was handicapped by the rule prohibiting foreigners from managing at club level (Liedholm had taken out dual citizenship to overcome this). Roma sought to get around it by naming a coach, Roberto Clagluna, as their official ‘trainer’, with Eriksson taking the title of director of football, but this use of a ‘stooge’ created more problems than it solved.

On taking over, Eriksson immediately asserted his authority by banning smoking, amending the bonus system to stop the players being rewarded for drawing games and ending ‘retiro’, the practice whereby the team ‘retired’ to weekend training camps. This latter decision, he now admits, was a mistake. He explained: ‘I tried to put an end to the custom of meeting at a hotel before our Sunday matches. When we finished training one Saturday, I told the players: “See you at lunch tomorrow.” This caused astonishment, and in the end I had to reinstate the meetings. Ritual and habit can provide security.’

In August, Roma won a pre-season tournament in Coruna, Spain, where top-class opposition was provided by Manchester United, Athletic Bilbao and Vasco da Gama, of Brazil, and the week before the Serie A programme started, they defeated Lazio 2–0 in the Italian Cup. After that it was a surprise, as well as a disappointment, when they were ominously slow out of the traps, with four successive draws in the league and a run of eight games without a win. A month into the season, the Italian Football Federation rejected the coaching association’s complaint against the employment of Eriksson, in defiance of the ban on foreign coaches, and scrapped the prohibition altogether. Freed of all impediments, real or imaginary, he was able to immerse himself in his work, and Roma picked up nicely after their first victory, 2–1 at home to Fiorentina. That was the launching pad for an unbeaten ten-match sequence, yet it was to be a stop-start sort of season, and after 11 games in Serie A their modest return of 12 points had them only in fifth place, six behind the surprise leaders, Verona. They had their moments, thumping Cremonese 5–0 away, Di Carlo getting a hat-trick, but generally flattered only to deceive. Fairly typical was the struggle they had to overcome little Wrexham in the second round of the Cup-Winners’ Cup in November. A single goal, scored by Francesco Graziani in the home leg, was enough to see off Steaua Bucharest in the first round, after which Welsh opposition, from the Football League’s Fourth Division, was expected to provide easy pickings. Roma won 2–0 at home in the first leg, with goals from Pruzzo and Cerezo, in a match notable for the return of Carlo Ancelotti, the powerful Italian international midfield player, who had been out injured for 11 months. The aggregate margin, 3–0, was comfortable enough, but The Times reported the decisive second leg as follows: ‘Only disgraceful refereeing in the first leg, and a rush of blood to the head at the wrong moment in the second stood between Wrexham and an extraordinary overall victory. Cushioned as they were by two highly debatable goals in the first leg, it would be easy to say that Roma, runners-up in the European Cup only six months ago, did just enough to dispose of England’s [sic] 89th best team. But the truth is that they might easily have trooped from the field here a beaten team, had it not been for some hasty finishing and the magnificence of Falcao, the Brazilian, who covered an amazing amount of ground for someone supposedly unfit.’

Falcao had joined Roma from the Brazilian club Internacional for £950,000 in 1980, and was widely acclaimed as the best midfield player at the 1982 World Cup. Twice Brazil’s Footballer of the Year, he came third in the World Footballer of the Year poll, behind Paolo Rossi and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, in 1982. Extravagantly gifted and immensely experienced, the 30 year old was expected to be the cornerstone of Eriksson’s team, but he injured his knee in a goalless draw with Verona on 21 October and then the president, Viola, complained bitterly about his failure to play against Juventus in Turin the following week. Falcao was carrying two stitches in his knee, but Viola felt he was fit enough to play, and a war of words ensued. Viola said that Cerezo, not Falcao, was Roma’s key player, Falcao took umbrage and Eriksson was caught in the middle, very much the loser. Falcao suffered more knee trouble in a 0–0 stalemate, against Lazio, on 11 November, and the Brazilian’s continuing fitness problems undermined the team that season. A superstar, on a two-year contract worth £1.5m, and a living legend among the club’s supporters after his colossal contribution to the 1983 title win, he dated Ursula Andress while still living with his mum in a sumptuous villa in the fashionable Monte Mario part of the city, and was ferried to and from training (and everywhere else) in a chauffeur-driven BMW. Unfortunately for all concerned, he spent most of the 1984/85 season on various treatment tables, eventually undergoing surgery on his troublesome knee in the United States before a lengthy convalescence at home in Brazil.

His last game for Roma was away to Maradona’s Napoli on 16 December 1984. Typically, he marked his farewell with a goal, but after celebrating with his usual jump, he returned to earth awkwardly, and the smile froze on his lips. Five days later, he was on the operating table for more surgery on his knee. The whole team had been dependent upon Falcao to an unhealthy degree, Eriksson felt. ‘Due to his knee problem, he had only four matches with us during my time at the club, but in the games he played, Roma were a completely different team. He went around the pitch pointing and co-ordinating. When he wasn’t able to play, the others would come to me and say: “We can’t play without Falcao.” That season we came seventh in the league. The following year, with just about the same team, we came second and won the cup. But it took me a whole year to get the players to understand that we could play without Falcao. Without him, the players had a mental block. Falcao’s presence, or absence, was decisive in determining how the players felt, and this in turn determined how well they played.’

Searching for a contemporary comparison, Eriksson told me: ‘If he was playing today, Falcao would be another Patrick Vieira.’ When Falcao was unavailable, the Roma midfield was staffed by Cerezo, Ancelotti, Conti and Giannini, an elegant stalwart who was to make 318 appearances for the club between 1981 and 1996. For goals, Roma relied largely upon Pruzzo, the most prolific striker in the club’s history, who weighed in with a modest eight in 21 league games. That Giannini, with four, was the second-highest scorer says it all about Roma’s football that season. Graziani, a World Cup-winning striker with Italy two years earlier, managed only two in 19 matches.

By January they were moving up the table, after successive 1–0 wins against Torino and Avellino, but the crowd, and the critics, were not happy. The newspapers complained that Roma were playing in an unsophisticated ‘English’ style. Quite right too, after their defeat by Liverpool, countered Viola. He’d had enough of Liedholm’s ‘lateral football’.

The cup competitions provided little by way of relief. After knocking out Genoa 3–0 and Lazio 2–0, Roma came unstuck in the quarter-finals of the Italian Cup, where they lost on the away-goal rule to Parma, who were then near the bottom of Serie B. In the Cup-Winners’ Cup, they reached the last eight, where they came up against Bayern Munich. It was billed as the tie of the round, but the first leg, in Bavaria on 6 March, was something of a damp squib. Bayern were without Michael Rummenigge, who was ill, and rushed Soren Lerby back to bolster their midfield when he was still suffering from the after-effects of ’flu, but they were still too strong for Roma, running out comfortable 2–0 winners. Reinhold Mathy missed two easy chances, Matthaus fired over when unmarked and Dieter Hoeness headed negligently the wrong side of a post before skipper Klaus Augenthaler finally gave Bayern the lead, just before half-time, with a rasping shot from distance. Pruzzo might have equalized after 72 minutes. Instead, Hoeness got the Germans’ second five minutes later, and Roma had it all to do in the return.

By the time it came around, on 20 March, Eriksson’s team were a disappointing seventh in the league, with 23 points from 20 games. Effectively, the tie was all over by the 33rd minute, when Tancredi fouled Mathy to enable Matthaus to make it 3–0 on aggregate from the penalty spot. Sebastiano Nela pulled one back after 80 minutes, but it was much too late, and anyway Bayern scored again within a minute, to win 2–1 on the night and 4–1 overall.

Finishing seventh in the league was nowhere near good enough for a club who had been runners-up and European Cup Finalists the previous year, and Eriksson needed something much better for the 1985/86 season if he was to keep his job. Poland’s Zbigniew Boniek, from Juventus, was chosen to replace Falcao, who made his last appearance in a friendly against Ajax in May, then went home to Brazil. He was still under contract to Roma, but when he was summoned back to Rome for medical checks, he ignored the call, with the result that Viola applied to the Italian federation for permission to cancel his contract and, to considerable surprise, won the case. ‘He’d had a couple of very bad injuries, and was never the same afterwards,’ Eriksson explained. Furious, Falcao entered into abortive negotiations with Fiorentina, before joining Sao Paulo. Five major corporations raised the money the Brazilian club needed, which was £1m for one season. Some £600,000 of this went to Roma, with Falcao pocketing the rest.

Red tape meant it was 10 August before Roma’s lawyers succeeded in getting his contract declared null and void, and at one stage, because of the limitation on foreign players, it seemed that they would have to ‘park’ Cerezo on loan somewhere to make room in the team for Boniek. ‘Zibi’, as he was known, had first come to the fore as a 22 year old, when he was one of the stars of the 1978 World Cup, in Argentina. Four years later, in Spain, he scored a hat-trick against Belgium, playing as a striker, and his all-round excellence was such that he finished his career in Serie A playing as a sweeper. When he arrived from Turin, it was said that he was Viola’s choice, not Eriksson’s, but the coach will not have that. He told me: ‘It was a decision made jointly between us. Nobody was ever signed by a club president without my complete agreement.’ Nevertheless, Eriksson had more arguments with Boniek than any other player, and was soon admonishing him for his passion for gambling (he bought a racehorse), suggesting he concentrate on his other off-the-field interests, chess and bridge. He was, however, a player worth indulging. ‘He was a different type to Falcao, not so authoritative, but top-class technically,’ Eriksson says. With Boniek at the hub of the team, Roma’s improvement was startling. Such was Eriksson’s success in convincing his players that they could win without Falcao that they challenged for the championship all season and won the Italian Cup. They started as they meant to go on, with successive victories away to Atalanta, 2–1, and at home to Udinese, 1–0. Pruzzo was quickly off the mark, scoring Roma’s first goal of the season. Revelling in the improved lines of supply engineered by Boniek, the young striker rattled in 19 goals in 24 appearances, including all five in the 5–1 trouncing of Avellino. ‘Pruzzo was extraordinary in the penalty area,’ Boniek told me. ‘He was a very good header of the ball, and lethal in front of goal. He scored so often because he was a natural finisher.’ Boniek himself weighed in with seven in 29 games, five of them coming in a midseason purple patch which brought five in five, and with Graziani also contributing five (in 14 matches), the team’s total was up from 33 to 51.

After the first 11 games, Roma were only sixth in the table, six points behind the leaders, Juventus, but after 21 they had closed the gap to just three points, and lay second. They had won more matches – 14 to Juve’s 13 – and had scored more goals (34 to their rivals’ 31). Then, with six rounds of the championship left, Roma beat Juventus 3–0, with goals from Graziani, Pruzzo and Cerezo signalling the start of a charge.

From being 12 points behind Juve at one stage, they came within touching distance of the scudetto. Going into the penultimate round of fixtures there was just one point between Juve, who were playing Milan, and Roma, who were at home to Lecce. The momentum was with Eriksson’s team, who were widely regarded as favourites for the title, when disaster struck. Roma, unaccountably, lost 3–2 to Lecce, who were bottom of the table and already condemned to relegation, thereby blowing their title chances. Everything seemed to be going to plan when Graziani scored after only seven minutes, but then Di Chiara equalized and a Berbas penalty gave Lecce the lead. Eight minutes into the second half, Berbas scored again, and Juve were home and dry. A goal from Pruzzo, after 82 minutes, was no sort of consolation. ‘Still today I think about that match with a lot of anger,’ Boniek says. ‘That defeat against Lecce put an end to our dreams. It was a game we had to win and should have won. It can happen sometimes, that the top team loses to the bottom, but I still find that result hard to accept.’

Giannini, offering an interesting insight into the Italian footballer’s mentality, says: ‘We arrived at that game exhausted, and at the interval we made another mistake. We thought we could make a meal of Lecce, without ever trying to get them on to our side. It is probably not completely ethical what I say, but perhaps it would have been better to try to reason with our opponents, asking them openly not to overdo their efforts.’

Looking back, Eriksson says: ‘If I could do it all over again, I would take the team away from Rome – away from the interference of club directors, the president, then fans and the media. Then, perhaps, things might have gone differently.’