from Karlskoga, and all three games in the play-offs to go up to Division Two (North).
Eriksson attributed the decisive improvement to the work of Willi Railo. He says: ‘My team always played well in the Kval, but when it came to the play-off, we’d mess up. At my invitation, Willi came and worked with us for one whole day. He made a cassette for individual players to listen to so that they could practise mental training on their own. We even stopped the bus on the way to the match so that they could use their cassettes to prepare mentally. We won the play-off and went up.’
People were starting to take notice.
CHAPTER EIGHT INTO THE BIG TIME
Gothenburg is where Swedish football began, and is the city that is most passionate about the game. The oldest club in existence today, Orgryte IS, formed there in 1887, as did the first governing body, in 1895. IFK Gothenburg, founder members of the league in 1904, have long been Sweden’s most successful and best-supported club, having won more championships than any other. When Sven-Goran Eriksson, of little Degerfors, heard they wanted to speak to him in 1979, he assumed that if there was a job on offer it would be with the youth team. He was wrong. At 34, Svennis had arrived in the big time.
Sven Carlsson was the finance director on the Gothenburg board at the time of the appointment. How had they identified Eriksson in the obscurity of the lower divisions? ‘It was well known that we were looking for a trainer, and Sven-Goran was recommended to us as one who was particularly good at youth development,’ Carlsson told me. ‘So the club president, Bertil Westblad, called him and he came to speak to us. We liked him straight away, and he agreed to take the job.’
It could have been one of the shortest appointments on record. After losing each of his first three games in charge, Eriksson called a team meeting and told the players, who had scorned the arrival of this ‘nobody’ from the backwoods, that if they wanted him out, he would go. It was a winning gamble, a turning point. He had confronted them and they admired him for it. So what if he was not the big name they had expected? They liked his style. One of the club’s best players was Glenn Hysen, the cultured central defender who was to win 70 international caps in a distinguished career which took him to PSV Eindhoven, Fiorentina (with Eriksson again) and Liverpool. Now retired, and back in Gothenburg, where he works as a commentator with Swedish television, Hysen says: ‘When Sven was appointed, he was a complete nobody. He walked into the dressing room, and all the players thought: “Who are you?” Here was this really shy man, who had been the manager of a little team called Degerfors, and now he was suddenly in charge of the biggest club in the country. We had never heard of him, as a player or as a coach, and it took us a while to get used to him and respect him. We made a terrible start, losing our first three matches that season, which was almost unheard of at Gothenburg.
‘In the third game we lost to a side newly promoted, and afterwards Sven asked the whole team if we wanted him to quit. He said he would walk away if we wanted him to. We all agreed that it was too early for him to resign, and decided we would give it time to see how things worked out. The rest is history. Sven won the UEFA Cup with Gothenburg, who became the first Swedish club ever to win a European trophy.
‘Now I hear he’s incredibly popular in England, but if that Gothenburg side had told him to go, his career might never have recovered. I don’t think he would have ended up working in a Volvo factory, but nor do I think he would have gone on to become a top manager if he had walked out of his first big job after three games.’
In 1978, Gothenburg finished third in the league, a distant seven points behind the champions, Osters Vaxjo. In Eriksson’s first season they were runners-up, just one point behind Halmstad, and they won the Swedish Cup, thrashing Atvidabergs 6–1 in the final. The championship had its most dramatic denouement for many years, boiling down to a last-day finish between Gothenburg and Halmstad, who were coached by Roy Hodgson. Halmstad were at home to relegation-bound AIK Stockholm, Gothenburg away to mid-table Hammarby. At halftime in the two games, when it was 0–0 in Halmstad and Gothenburg were leading (they won 3–2), it looked like Eriksson’s title, but Hodgson’s team scored twice in the second half to clinch it.
Hodgson remembers it well: ‘I’d been at Halmstad since 1976. In 1979 we led the league from start to finish, but we were lucky when we played Gothenburg at home in the autumn. We were top but they were having a good spell, winning games while we were drawing, and therefore closing the gap. When we played them, we were very fortunate. We won because the referee disallowed them what was a perfectly good goal. Our defence had pushed out, one of their strikers stayed in, and when the ball came to him he looked 20 yards offside. But what the referee and linesman hadn’t picked up was that it was a backpass from one of our defenders. That goal, had it stood, would have put them 1–0 up, and made it a very different game. Instead, we went on to win 2–1. We continued on our way, staying top but faltering a bit because we weren’t winning every game and Gothenburg were, and we came to the last day with only one point in it. We were at home to AIK, who were a poor team, and all we had to do was get the same result as Gothenburg. But if we drew and they won, they’d take the title on goal difference. They had a difficult away game, against Hammarby, in Stockholm.
‘We had a full house. The capacity at Halmstad was only 16,000, but fans were packed into our little stadium, waiting to celebrate a championship which we’d been on course for, really, from the first day. In 26 rounds of matches, we’d been top for 23. It was a big day for a small club – Halmstad had a population of barely 40,000 – and the players were nervous. We played very poorly in the first half, and should have been 2–0 down at half-time, but they missed a couple of gilt-edged chances, and we came in at 0–0. In the second half we scored a wonder goal after five minutes, and that settled the players down. We went on to win quite comfortably, 2–0, but I shall never forget that first half, when they could have put us away. Gothenburg had won as well, so we were champions by a single point.’
Runners-up and cup winners, it had hardly been a bad season for IFK, but not everybody was happy. Frank Sjoman, a respected journalist, wrote: ‘Eriksson has been at variance with the ideals of the fans since, like most managers, he wants results before anything. Before long, he had introduced more tactical awareness, workrate and had tightened the old cavalier style. The result has been that while Gothenburg are harder to beat, they are also harder to watch, and though they were challenging for the title, the average gate dropped by 3,000 to 13,320 – still the best in the country.’
Eriksson was changing from the traditional sweeper-controlled, man-for-man marking defence, to what became known as ‘Swenglish’ 4–4–2. He had taken the ferry across the North Sea to study Bobby Robson’s methods at Ipswich, and also journeyed to Liverpool’s Melwood training ground to learn from Bob Paisley, the most successful English manager of all time. Bobby Ferguson, then Robson’s assistant, said: ‘He [Eriksson] would stand by the side of the training pitch and note down everything. He never took his eyes off Bobby, and how he was organizing things.’
Glenn Schiller, a defensive midfielder who had come up through the youth team, recalled that it was almost a case of playing by numbers at first. ‘I remember it as if it was yesterday,’ he told me. ‘We worked all the time on pressing the opposition and running in support of the man on the ball. Svennis would place us like chess pieces on the training pitch. “You stand here, you go there,” and so on. It was hard work. The biggest problem was fitting all the pieces together and getting them all to move in harmony. The defensive part was the key to it all. When we were attacking, there was a fair amount of freedom to express ourselves, but we had to defend from strict, zonal starting positions.’
The new ‘Swenglish’ was deeply unpopular at first, but in fairness, the Gothenburg team that won the cup (needing extra-time and penalties to see off Orebro on the way) scored 29 goals in seven games in the process, which suggests ‘the old cavalier style’ was not entirely a thing of the past. Apart from the 20-year-old Hysen, notable members of that side included Torbjorn Nilsson, the most accomplished player in Sweden, who could scheme as well as score, 19-year-old Glenn Stromberg, an attacking midfielder who played in