Joe Lovejoy - Sven-Goran Eriksson

Q: Why was there such a gap between the midfield and the strikers?

Eriksson: There’s a dilemma there. You want to play the ball forward as early as possible, but to keep the team together as a unit you need to play three, four or five passes and then get it forward. That gives time for the defenders and midfield to move up. If you just kick the ball long, then the strikers make their runs and the rest of the team is not there with them, and when they lose possession, there is that gap there. That happened too often, and it’s something we’ll have to work on.

Q: You seemed to be more emotionally affected than you had been at the World Cup.

Eriksson: When we went to the World Cup, we weren’t sure that we could win it, but during the tournament we started to believe that it was possible. At Euro 2004 I was always convinced that we were one of the teams capable of winning it. We didn’t and I’m sorry. I’ve lost many football games in my career, but to go out like that, on penalties, was awful. The difference between winning and losing was like this (he held up a thumb and forefinger, half an inch apart). We are so nearly there.

Q: What are the positives to be taken from the tournament?

Eriksson: Sol Campbell was a rock. Incredible. He could have been the match winner against Portugal – should have been. Ashley Cole also had an extremely good tournament. And then there was Wayne Rooney. We knew about him in England beforehand, but he proved to be even better than we thought, and he is a big name now, not just in Europe, but around the world. I think he will be a star of the World Cup in 2006, the European Championship in 2008, and way beyond that. If you are that good at 18, then by the time you’re 22 or 24 you could be phenomenal. Wayne is already one of our jewels, and he will get better and better. It is not just about his goals, it’s about how he plays football and the thought behind it. He’s always a thought process ahead in the positions he takes up, and the way he links up our game is just fantastic from one so young. With him in the side, it’s so much easier for us to play out with the ball. You can target him and he’ll keep it or get fouled, in which case he has got us a free-kick. I’d expected him to play well, but not at that level.

Q: What would be your abiding memory of Euro 2004?

Eriksson: The last three minutes against France I guess (when England went from winning 1–0 to losing 2–1). That or the last penalty against Portugal. No, definitely the last three minutes against France. That was awful – complete madness.

True enough – it was ‘madness’ reminiscent of the circumstances in which he got the job in the first place …

In hindsight it is clear that Kevin Keegan should have gone straight after Euro 2000, when the ‘Three Lions’ returned from the Low Countries with their tails lodged firmly between their legs. Tactical naïvety has become a clichéd criticism, trotted out ad nauseam on every radio phone-in, but Keegan was its personification. Against Portugal in Eindhoven, with England leading 2–0, he opted not to shut up shop and man-mark Luis Figo, arguably the best player in the world, with the result that England let slip what should have been a winning position and lost 3–2. Their hopes were resurrected with a 1–0 victory over the worst German team in living memory, but then a deserved 3–2 defeat against Romania, in Charleroi, where some of his choices were exposed as inadequate at international level, brought Keegan and company home before the competition proper had started.

After Glenn Hoddle had psycho-babbled himself out of the job, Keegan was portrayed as ‘the people’s choice’ by the Football Association. He wasn’t. That the label stuck was something of a triumph for the spin doctors at the FA, for in the opinion polls it was not Keegan but Terry Venables who had emerged as the clear favourite, both with the fans and with the professionals in the game. In the aftermath of Euro 2000, it was apparent that ‘King Kevin’ had feet of clay. The players liked him, but despaired at his lack of tactical nous, the public could see through his crass, British bulldog tub-thumping, and his employers were beginning to have their doubts.

The change should, and probably would, have been made before the start of the World Cup qualifying campaign, but for the absence of a suitable candidate who was available and, crucially, on whom the FA mandarins could agree. Venables, who had proved his worth in taking England to the semi-finals of Euro 96, would have had a second crack at the job but for the intransigence of Noel White, the influential chairman of the FA’s international committee. So Keegan was allowed to continue – a decision the FA was to rue.

By one of the quirks of fate that abound in football, the first game in World Cup qualifying saw England at home to Germany, the old enemy providing the opposition for the last international to be played under Wembley’s twin towers. The game would be followed by a second qualifier, away to Finland, four days later. Traditionally, the Germans were something of a bête noire, but there were no Beckenbauers, Netzers or Mullers in their millennium class, and England, who had just beaten them 1–0 in Euro 2000, should have had nothing to fear.

But that was reckoning without Keegan’s selectorial waywardness. For some unfathomable reason, he played Gareth Southgate, a central defender, in midfield, where this most willing and diligent of professionals was a four-square peg in a circular hole. England were depressingly poor, but Germany were not much better, and the only goal of a low-quality game was more the product of defensive deficiency than Teutonic inspiration. There should have been no more than token danger when Liverpool’s Dietmar Hamann stepped up to take a free-kick fully 30 yards out, but England neglected to form the customary defensive wall, with the result that Hamann was able to beat David Seaman’s slow-mo dive, low to his right.

England were booed off the pitch and Keegan was verbally abused by his erstwhile admirers as he made the long, disconsolate trudge around the perimeter, during which the extent of his inadequacy finally hit home. By the time he reached the sanctuary of the dressing room, he had made a fateful decision. It was time to quit. Disarmingly honest, he told the players and his employers, and then the nation, via television, that he was not good enough for the job. Somebody else should have a go.

In the dressing room, there was emotion and confusion in equal measure. Some of the senior players, such as Tony Adams and Graeme Le Saux, urged the manager to ‘sleep on it’ before finally making up his mind, but he was adamant. Adam Crozier, the FA’s Chief Executive at the time, and did most to try to persuade Keegan to reconsider. Recalling one of his worst days in the job, he told me: ‘Losing to Germany was an incredibly disappointing way to start the World Cup qualifying series. It set us right back on our heels. To lose your first game at home to your main rivals would be a major setback for anybody, but it was the way we lost it. The way we played that afternoon, we seemed to have gone backwards again.

‘From my conversations with him, I know Kevin could see that there were good young players coming through, who were going to improve the team over the next couple of years, and he wasn’t sure that he was the right man to get the best out of them. Kevin is a great patriot, and he had always had a great rapport with the fans. Not everybody will agree with this, but I felt it was a very brave thing for him to say: “I don’t think I’m up to the job.” The thing I didn’t agree with him over, and I told him so, was his timing. My view was that if that was the way he felt, the time to go was after the game against Finland, four days later. Quitting after Germany left us completely rudderless for the trip to Helsinki. Another false start in the second game, which was what we had, was always going to make the task of qualifying even more difficult for whoever took over permanently. So I felt Kevin should have stayed on for that one, and I certainly tried very hard to persuade him, as did a number of the players and Noel White, Chairman of the International Committee.