Joe Lovejoy - Sven-Goran Eriksson

‘In the dressing room straight after the game we all tried – Tony Adams particularly – to get him to reconsider. Don’t forget, he was very popular with the players, and even after that game there was still a lot of love for Kevin and a great deal of support. They wanted him to stay, but there was no persuading him. Anybody who knows Kevin will tell you that one of his characteristics is that once he has made up his mind about something, that’s it. He won’t budge.

‘Crucial to his decision, I think, was the reaction of the fans as he came away from the pitch. He had always had that fantastic relationship with them; now they were booing and insulting him. In the dressing room, his mindset was complete. He wasn’t emotional, not at all. People imagine that he was, but he wasn’t. He came to a very clear-headed decision, and I think he made it with the best of intentions. He felt it was the right thing for his country. Even for the game on the Wednesday, his point of view was that the team would do better under someone else. He said to me: “I don’t think I can lift them [the players] because I don’t feel up there myself.”’

For Crozier and White, the urgent task that chaotic Saturday night was to find a stand-in to take the squad to Helsinki, less than 48 hours later. Crozier explained: ‘It wasn’t just that we’d lost, or that it was the last game at Wembley, but the England coach had resigned, so there was a huge furore about what had happened and where we went from here. In terms of the Wednesday match, there was only one sensible solution, and that was to get our technical director, Howard Wilkinson, to do it. Given the timescale [the England squad flew out to Helsinki on the Monday morning], it had to be somebody from within, and Howard had the knowledge, both of our players and of international football. So on the Saturday night, by about 7.30pm, we’d agreed that he would be in charge for Finland. I spoke to Noel White about it, and checked with the FA chairman [Geoff Thompson] to make sure that he was comfortable with it. But in the final analysis, our options were so limited that it had to be Howard. To have put someone in from scratch would have been asking the impossible.’

One of the more fanciful tabloid newspapers reported that Crozier had left the dressing room and telephoned Eriksson’s agent, Athole Still, to enquire about his availability. (An interesting, cosmopolitan character, who trained as an opera singer in Italy and worked as a swimming coach, TV commentator and journalist, Still got to know Eriksson in the mid-1980s when they met during abortive negotiations to take Still’s first football client, John Barnes, from Watford to Roma, who were then coached by Eriksson. A friendship was forged over the next few years and, when Eriksson’s first agent, the Swede Borg Lanz, died in 1993, Still replaced him.) ‘That was rubbish,’ Crozier said, laughing. What did happen was that before England left for Finland, Crozier formed a sub-committee whose brief was to draw up a list of candidates. As is his wont, he wanted to be seen to be proactive. The new manager would be his man.

The assumption was always that Wilkinson was a non-runner. As a manager of the old school, at Leeds, he had been good enough to win the last First Division title before the advent of the Premier League, and in those days he had confided that his driving ambition was to manage England. He had done it once before in a caretaker’s capacity, after Hoddle’s abrupt departure, but a comprehensive 2–0 defeat by France at Wembley did nothing for his credentials, and England’s goalless bore with Finland on 11 October 2000 merely confirmed the impression that the game had moved on and passed him by. The occasion was more remarkable for what happened before, and afterwards, than for anything that happened in the 90 minutes. The final training session before the match was witnessed by a group of English football correspondents and by two members of the FA’s international committee, all of whom were distinctly unimpressed. The journalists noticed that England’s game plan seemed to revolve around hitting long balls, right to left, for Emile Heskey to knock down. The FA kingmakers noted that Wilkinson’s man-management methods left as much to be desired as his tactics. Watching him bark out orders via a microphone headset, one said to the other: ‘We’ve no chance of winning here, he’s lecturing international footballers like schoolboys.’ As if to reinforce the point, two of the senior professionals present, Stuart Pearce and Teddy Sheringham, exchanged horrified looks behind Wilkinson’s back.

The poverty of England’s performance in the Olympic stadium, and a table which showed them bottom, with one point and Germany top with six, moved one reporter to enquire whether it might be better to forget about qualifying for Japan and Korea, and use the remaining matches to bring on younger players with Euro 2004 and the 2006 World Cup in mind. Instead of the expected ‘each game is there to be won’ response, Wilkinson replied: ‘The possibility you’ve raised obviously has to be considered. In the interests of the long term, we could go into it [the rest of the qualifying series] picking a team that’s going to be there in four years’ time.’

But would the public stand for the jam tomorrow approach? ‘If it’s the right thing to do in the opinion of the professionals, they’ve got to. What’s the alternative? To keep doing what we’re doing at the moment, riding the rollercoaster? Quite frankly, I’m fed up with that. I don’t even enjoy the highs particularly, because every time we’re up there I think: “Here we go again, hold on to the bar because we’ll be going down any moment.” No, the real alternative is to go in with realistic expectations and to outline clearly to the players what is expected of them. We’ve got to make sure that their expectations are realistic, and that they don’t fall into the trap of trying to achieve what you lot [the media] set out in your agenda.’

Any slender chance Wilkinson might have had of getting the job on a permanent basis disappeared in this puff of pomposity. Abandon the World Cup, and a lucrative ride on the gravy train? This was heresy at the FA. Crozier says: ‘I’m not sure Howard wanted it, and the general feeling among the sub-committee was that he was never going to get it.’ There is conflicting testimony as to what happened next. Crozier would have it that he was immediately intent upon crossing the Channel, and the Rubicon, by appointing from abroad. Always the mover and shaker, he made all the running. ‘In the period between the games against Germany and Finland, I compiled what I thought was the right short list. Then I got the sub-committee together, and spoke to them about why I’d done what I had, and said: “These are the people who should be in the frame. For a job of such magnitude, I thought there were only five who could rise to the challenge.”’

Apart from Crozier, the head-hunting subcommittee comprised: Geoff Thompson (the FA chairman), Noel White (chairman of the international committee), David Richards (vice-chairman of the international committee and chairman of the Premier League), David Dein of Arsenal and Peter Ridsdale of Leeds United (both of whom represented the Premier League on the FA board) and Wilkinson (FA technical director). It was to these men, Crozier says, that he took his five potential candidates. He told me: ‘We talked a lot about the criteria for the job, and the most important one for me, right at the very top of the list, was a sustained record of success. At the time I said success internationally, which was misunderstood. I didn’t mean a record of success in international football, but success wherever the person had coached, across the world. Our man had to be successful, not just as a one-season wonder, but somebody who had really achieved, wherever he had been. We wanted it all – international credibility, tactical nous, man-management expertise and the ability to handle the media. We were looking for respect within the game and the right personality and cultural profile for international football, where the highs are incredibly high, the lows really low, and there’s a lot of time between games to fret over a bad result or get over-excited by a good one. We needed somebody who could cope with both extremes in a very levelheaded way. An emotional person over-reacts, and it becomes a rollercoaster existence. A calm personality is essential for international management.