Joe Lovejoy - Sven-Goran Eriksson

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’.