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. He insisted, for instance, on picking players patently out of position; he lauded a blatantly butterfingered goalkeeper; and he kept cueing-in a teeming cast of crazy late-match substitutions (‘Will the Dancing Hitlers please wait in the wings,’ quoted some wag with The Producers in mind). Most worrying to the English, whose football has forever demanded tearing passion to tatters, was the Swede’s complete lack of frenzied fervour on the touchline — sans chewing-gum, ardour or wild-eyed, purple-cheeked obscenities — when things were going pear-shaped on the pitch. In England’s two limp and losing quarter-finals of both the World Cup and European Cup, respectively against Brazil and Portugal, Sven just sat on the sideline as if in church during a dull sermon, impassively picking imaginary fluff from his impeccably tailored blue blazer and with just the flickering twitch of a resigned smile teetering around his tight little mouth, while the desperate, boozed-up nation at home tore their hair out in clumps and looked for the cat to strangle. Precisely the same happened when Northern Ireland, with jaunty green relish, clobbered England at Windsor Park last month. Sure, there is something appealing about total detachment: it’s only a game after all. But it is definitely not the English way of soccer. Well, not since Ramsey’s sidekick Harold Sheperdson stood up to hail ‘hurrah!’ at the concluding whistle in the World Cup final of 1966, at which Alf sharply ordered, ‘Sit down, Sheperdson, stop making a ruddy exhibition of yourself.’
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