Sven’s seven deadly sins

Here are a few reasons why the Football Association should have sacked the manager of England, Sven-Goran Eriksson.

1. Allowing England to lose to one of the worst teams in the world, Northern Ireland, in a crucial World Cup qualifying game.

2. Spending what seems to have been most of his free time attempting to find even more lucrative employment elsewhere.

3. Failing to get past the quarter finals of both the European championship and the World Cup despite possessing the most talented and competent English team for more than 40 years.

4. Preparing the ground to take over as manager of an English Premiership team, Aston Villa, and implicating the England captain, David Beckham, in his machinations.

5. Presiding over the heaviest England defeat in 25 years (4–1 to Denmark, in case you’d forgotten) and our first defeat by those footballing giants, Australia.

6. Being tactically inept; not knowing how to defend a one-goal lead against moderate opposition. Not knowing how to change the course of a match at half-time. Thinking that Peter Crouch is an England player.

7. Degrading the institution of international friendly matches by taking the entire England team off at half-time during such games and replacing them with people who may well be valuable, intrinsically decent human beings, but are not very good at football.

These seem to me fairly major transgressions, the most important of them, in my opinion, being 1, 3 and 6. They seem a greater cause for dismissal or resignation than, for example, having a six-month affair with a rent boy regardless of whether a ‘bizarre and degrading’ sexual act took place during these liaisons, which is what did for the briefly famous Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten. However, one way or another, Sven has now been sacked: ‘sacked’ is not what he calls it, nor was it the term used by the FA, but that is what it amounts to.