id="u2d2587ae-d85a-57ea-983a-1b8364a113f7">
SVEN
THE FINAL RECKONING
Joe Lovejoy
CONTENTS
12 Dancing to Mantovani’s Tune
23 ‘Cheer Up, It’s not a Funeral’
PROLOGUE WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?
‘My advice to Sven is to quit his job, too. Those bastards at the FA want to destroy him. The knives are out.’
FARIA ALAM, after resigning as personal assistant
to the Football Association’s executive director, David Davies, August 2004
It was all a far cry from the heady days of November 2000, when Sven-Goran Eriksson was warmly greeted as England’s saviour on taking up the management at a time when Kevin Keegan’s abrupt departure had left the national team rock bottom, not just in their World Cup qualifying group, but mentally as well. Now, nearly four years on, the FA wanted him out, and were happy for it to be known that the best paid coach in the world was on borrowed time. If his employers were dissatisfied with Eriksson, the feeling was certainly mutual. He had been ‘hung out to dry’, as he put it, over the ‘Fariagate’ sex scandal that had threatened to bring down the hierarchy of English football’s governing body, and briefly considered sueing for constructive dismissal before opting to soldier on until the next attractive job offer came along.
How had it come to this? It is a story that makes ‘Footballers’ Wives’ look tame, a tale of unbridled lust, greed, intrigue and xenophobia, laced with a lot of football – some good, some bad. When all is said and done, the final verdict has to be that England’s first foreign coach proved to be an expensive disappointment. He deserves credit for reviving the dispirited and disorganized team he inherited from Keegan, but having raised morale, performance and public expectation, he achieved no more than quarter-final places at the 2002 World Cup and 2004 European Championship when, with a more adventurous approach, England might have done much better.
In football terms, history will judge Eriksson to have been too defensively orientated, too inflexible in his team selection and tactics, and too indulgent of