Joe Lovejoy - Sven-Goran Eriksson

The administrators at Soho Square discussed England’s disappointing performance at Euro 2004 upon their return, and there was criticism of Eriksson’s management. It had not gone unnoticed that while the FA had the best-paid coach in the world, it clearly did not have the best coach. It was the cause of some embarrassment when a league table of remuneration revealed that Luis Felipe Scolari, who had won the World Cup with Brazil before taking Portugal to the European final, earned £1.1m a year to Eriksson’s £4m. Worse still, Otto Rehhagel, who was appointed at roughly the same time as Eriksson, had brought Greece from nowhere to European pre-eminence on just £490,000 per annum.

The FA considered the fact that France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain and Sweden, among others, had all changed their coach, for one reason or another, after the tournament. While privately rueful about getting railroaded into handing their man an extended, enhanced contract before Euro 2004, when he threatened to decamp to Chelsea, they were not, pre-‘Fariagate’, seriously tempted to follow the trend.

The chief executive who had pushed Eriksson’s appointment through, Adam Crozier, had long gone, and his successor, Mark Palios, was nowhere near as enamoured with him, yet the equable Swede survived for a number of reasons, which may be enumerated as follows:

1. Arsenal’s David Dein, the most influential of all the FA mandarins, remained staunch. Dein had effectively blocked moves to replace Kevin Keegan with Arsene Wenger, who initially had been the choice of the head-hunting sub-committee, and had gone to Rome with Crozier to secure Eriksson’s early release from Lazio. He was standing by his man.

2. The respect Eriksson had from the players and his popularity with them impressed his employers. Despite the shortcomings of some of their football, the England team felt they were unlucky to go out to Portugal in the quarter-final in the light of Sol Campbell’s dubiously disallowed goal and the early loss to injury of Wayne Rooney. It was easy for the FA to concur.

3. England’s players were overplayed at club level. The excuse was tediously familiar, but a valid one nevertheless. It was not only David Beckham and Steven Gerrard who looked tired after a demanding season, none of Real Madrid’s ‘galacticos’ did themselves justice at the tournament, and it was surely no coincidence that the winners, Greece, had not been burdened by lengthy Champions’ League commitments.

4. Sacking, and paying up Eriksson, who had a new contract with another four years to run, would be ruinously expensive, and there was no obvious replacement to hand. Wenger had said he intended to stay with Arsenal for another season at least, and although Steve McClaren (Middlesbrough), Alan Curbishley (Charlton) and Sam Allardyce (Bolton) had their advocates, it was generally believed that there was no English candidate ready for the job. Fanciful suggestions that Scolari or Rehhagel might be engaged were no more than that. Not only were they committed to Portugal and Greece respectively, neither spoke any English.

From Eriksson’s point of view, although he has made no secret of his preference for the day-today involvement of club football, the jobs he coveted most, at Chelsea, Manchester United, Real Madrid and Juventus, were no longer available. In the circumstances, coach and employers were both content to soldier on. That said, there was an acknowledgement that England had under-achieved in Portugal. They had travelled with high hopes, only for the country’s best crop of good young players for a generation to return with tails lodged firmly between their legs, using a side door to avoid supporters who had turned out to meet them at Luton airport.

Gary Lineker, no Eriksson fan, was not alone in laying the blame squarely at the well-heeled size nines of the coach and David Beckham. The former England captain said: ‘England looked jaded. We couldn’t keep the ball and defended too deep, but the most disturbing thing was how we proved that we have no Plan B. Plan A was to allow Wayne Rooney to play opponents virtually on his own, filling up all the space between the forwards and midfield, as well as scoring most of the goals. When Rooney went off, we didn’t know what to do. We lost all shape and there was no link man to the forwards. The whole back four just stood practically on David James’ toes, where any sort of contact on the ball from the attacker is likely to end in a goal.

‘England made that mistake throughout the tournament, and I kept waiting for them to get it right. It’s just basic stuff, and you have to raise a question mark against the coach when such things are continually allowed to happen. England also suffered from having David Beckham clearly not fit. He had a very poor tournament, and that was down to a lack of conditioning. To put it bluntly, he was off the pace, and a shadow of the player I saw in his first six months at Real Madrid.’

The FA’s response came from their executive director, David Davies, who said: ‘We are lucky to have Sven – and we’re proud of “Becks”. People very quickly forget, in the disappointment of going out of a tournament, that Sven is a manager many teams around the world covet. He is licking his wounds at the moment, but he has told us he is already looking forward to the next World Cup. Everybody knows David Beckham has had a difficult time recently, but he is immensely proud to be captain of England, and we are immensely proud to have him.’

The party line was unconvincing. It was true that Eriksson had been coveted, and clandestinely sounded out, by Manchester United, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Internazionale in the 18 months leading up to Euro 2004, but no one was chasing him after the tournament. Beckham meanwhile had given England no reason for pride – on the contrary, his condition in Portugal was little short of a disgrace. It was one thing for the captain to be hampered by injury at the World Cup, quite another for a lack of fitness, due to laxity in training, to render him a passenger in the closing stages of big matches at the European Championship. His excuse, that conditioning work at Real Madrid was not as rigorous as it had been at Manchester United, was a poor one, instantly refuted by Carlos Queiroz, Real’s coach for 2003/04, who said: ‘During the last three weeks of the season, Luis Figo was at every training session, giving 100 per cent, but David missed some for various reasons, or sometimes for no reason at all. Figo didn’t go skiing in April when the team were still playing in the Champions’ League. That’s where the difference lay. In the final analysis, one player keeps performing to the end and the other doesn’t.’

Beckham’s exhaustion was plain for all to see in the latter stages of the quarter-final against Portugal, and it was the captain who should have been substituted, not Steven Gerrard. Twice signals went out from the bench, suggesting Beckham came off, but on both occasions he waved his hands dismissively, clearly gesturing his unwillingness. Eriksson’s failure to insist on his removal from the action was rooted partly in loyalty to a player who had become a trusted lieutenant, but also in a character flaw. As his partner, Nancy Dell’Olio, said a few weeks after the tournament, in another context: ‘Sven tries to avoid confrontation.’ It was an observation that explained a lot – those ridiculous wholesale changes in friendly internationals at the behest of the club managers for one thing, the continued presence in the squad of Emile Heskey for another. The really successful managers have no such qualms about difficult decisions that are likely to cause conflict.

Support for Eriksson, albeit qualified, came from one of his predecessors, Sir Bobby Robson, who thought he had been ‘too negative’ at times, but said: ‘When I took England to the 1990 World Cup, I was a far better coach and manager than I had been at Mexico ’86 or the ’88 European Championship, and it will be the same for Sven. There is nothing like having two major tournaments under your belt to help you deal with different situations when they arise. My view is that a couple of the changes Sven made against Portugal were a bit negative, but I support his right to have the chance to show what he has learned in 2006.