Joe Lovejoy - Sven-Goran Eriksson

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.’