Joe Lovejoy - Sven-Goran Eriksson

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.’

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?’