Joe Lovejoy - Sven-Goran Eriksson

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.