The former England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson has terminal cancer, he says he expects to be dead before the year is out. In an age when such grim diagnoses are usually kept private until their morbid predictions have come to pass, it was characteristically candid of the 75-year-old Swede to go public like this, even though doing so inevitably invited a fresh round of media scrutiny of a life that has already been scrutinised intensively over many years.
He treated players as grown-ups, even though they often weren’t
Any England football manager gets attention – it comes with the territory. But when you start having public relationships with a flamboyant Italian lawyer, a prominent TV presenter and even your boss’s secretary, as Sven famously did, then inevitably the attention will increase to the point of frenzy. Sven was once almost as regular a subject on the front pages as he was on the back ones. In response to his grim news, his ex-girlfriend, fellow Swede Ulrika Jonsson, posted that Sven is ‘not a decent person’ – something that she evidently soon thought better of and deleted, a reminder of Sven’s spell as a subject of endless tabloid fascination.
Unlike coverage of the death of one of his predecessors as England manager, Terry Venables, which focused on his achievements as a manager, most of Sven’s pre-obits were more about his colourful lifestyle. If we can put aside his romantic adventures, and his decency or otherwise in this context, it is to Sven as a football manager that I would like to pay tribute – and, as I suspect, that he would prefer to be remembered.
In that context he continues to be severely under appreciated, as the recent flurry of coverage only reconfirmed. Typical was Jawad Iqbal, writing here in The Spectator last weekend, who concluded of his spell as England boss: ‘He never made any progress, not really.’ I think this is completely wrong.
Sven was – at least until the tenure of current incumbent Gareth Southgate – the most consistent England manager of all time, which, given that the team had been plagued by inconsisency for three decades prior to his appointment, was no small achievement. And it is in the context of the various failures between 1970 and Sven’s appointment in 2001 that his record must be assessed.
I started following football as a young boy in the early 1970s, soon after England had handed over the World Champions baton to Brazil. But I would be almost an adult before I got to see England even play in a World Cup. We didn’t qualify for the (admittedly then much smaller) 1972 Euros finals. Nor the 1974 World Cup. The same thing happened with those respective competitions in 1976 and 1978.
It wasn’t until 1980 that England would qualify for a major competition again, and then limped out at the group stage. A whole decade had passed in the meantime. After this nadir, the 1980s were an improvement but there were still embarrassing moments: failing to qualify for the 1984 Euros and losing every game at the 1988 tournament.
After the brief flirtation with success in 1990, England reverted to being awful – failing to win a game in Sweden 1992 and losing limply to the hosts, leading to the Swedes/Turnips comparison that gave Graham Taylor his tabloid nickname, before failing to even qualify for USA 1994. In fact, from 1972 until Sven’s arrival in 2001, England failed to qualify for six of the 14 tournaments we entered when not qualifying automatically as hosts.
Sven took over an England team which had long been the international equivalent of a domestic ‘yo yo’ club – a Norwich, Fulham or West Brom – who go up and down, down and up. And he quickly transformed them as akin to an embedded upper top tier club which might just one day win something again: like an Arsenal, Aston Villa or Tottenham of today.
Immediately before him there had been three different managers for successive tournaments – Venables in 1996, Hoddle in 1998, Keegan in 2000 – hardly helping establish consistency. Just months into the job, Sven produced the best England result I have ever seen, the 5-1 win over Germany in Munich in September 2001. And we qualified for all three tournaments of his tenure, World Cups 2002 and 2006 and in between Euro 2004.
At his first tournament, in Japan, he took England to the World Cup quarter finals before being knocked out by eventual winners, Brazil. At both the 2004 Euros and the 2006 World Cup, he reached the quarter finals again, going out both times on penalties to Portugal.
Of course he never won anything. And many never forgave him for that – just as they hector Gareth Southgate today with the same charge. Sir Alf Ramsey of course won a World Cup – but he never actually qualified for one, failing at his only attempt, for the 1974 tournament. Similarly Terry Venables didn’t need to qualify, admitted automatically as hosts in his only tournament, Euro 1996. And though we pushed Germany very close indeed that summer, it was never really the stellar tournament it’s now remembered as: we only won two of our five games, one against a poor Scotland. Bobby Robson also went further than Sven, to that semi at Italia 1990, where we again pushed Germany very close. But although he never messed up a qualification, he did mess up his other tournament, Euro 1988, rather badly.
And Sven might just have won the World Cup himself – if David Seaman hadn’t chronically misjudged the flight of a miss-hit free kick in that 2002 quarter final against Brazil. I covered that World Cup, as I had the previous tournament, the 2000 Euros under Kevin Keegan, when England went out at the group stage. I was at that game. Had we got past Brazil – and we were playing well at 1-1 at the moment of Seaman’s howler – we would have been favourites to win the thing. We had progressed so far in such a short time under Sven. It seemed miraculous.
The urbane Swede – the first foreign manager of England – achieved this transformation by being a moderniser and pragmatist. Sven managed the transition between a time when it was completely normal, say, for the playing squad to contain one or two alcoholics to the current methodologies of micro-performance data analysis, cryotherapeutic recovery, the study of marginal gains and all that. He treated players as grown-ups, even though they often weren’t. He was open with the media and through that relationship was open with the public.
Dismissing Sven on this basis that he never won anything is to disregard quite how much England improved under him. As if to prove the point, immediately after he had gone, Steve ‘The Wally With The Brolly’ McClaren, took England back to being second rate: Euro 2008 proceeded without England, at no great loss to the tournament. Though thankfully this return to 1970s-style abject failure has proved a blip.
Sven’s legacy is that English players are no longer amateurish. Our league is the strongest in the world. We now expect to qualify for tournaments – and consistently do so. And when England arrive at those tournaments, they are among the five or six favourites. They reached a semi-final, final and quarter finals in their last three outings. One of these days they might actually win one. If they ever do, I shall toast Sven as the original architect of this enormous improvement in England’s trajectory.
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