Sven’s last stand

A revitalised Scottish team will cause a heck of a bonny din at splintery auld Hampden this afternoon — olde tyme optimism. Ditto Northern Ireland at venerable Windsor Park. Neither are likely to qualify for next year’s World Cup finals, but England are, yet the preliminaries to their match at Old Trafford against Austria have been imbued with jaundiced, fatalistic vapours. Should England come a cropper today the fuss will be fulminating and the fallout grievous as Sven-Goran Eriksson’s team attempt to salvage something from the wreckage in their last-chance qualifier against Poland on Wednesday. If England fail to qualify for Germany 2006, their Swedish coach will be on that night’s flight to Stockholm and, alas for drama, the English ‘theatre of dreams’ would be deprived of a singular tragicomic actor-manager who (at the drop of a hat, a midfield dynamo, or his own trousers) brought to the nation, in turn, farce, gaiety, emollience, composure …and utter exasperation.

In the emotive swirl of soccer, sex and backstabbing which has overtaken the inscrutable Swede during his five years here, it is difficult to twig that no England manager since Alf Ramsey has been so successful in competitive matches, or that he arrived with a CV full of glowing starbursts, having managed leading clubs in three countries and landed three league titles as well as a Uefa Cup and a Cup Winners’ Cup. Long before the gossip columnists had lined up their prey, Sven solemnly announced, ‘The time I shall have everything absolutely together will be the 2006 World Cup, which England will undoubtedly win.’ What’s Swedish for the moment of truth is at hand?

It was lunacy for the seemingly strait-laced Eriksson to allow his nocturnal dallies with Dolly and dillies with Deirdre and so on to be discovered and ridiculed, especially as, at the time, concerned football folk were becoming increasingly wary of his competence.