the inquiry in advance of its outcome, but a slap on the wrist and a reminder to restrict his comments to his area of jurisdiction was deemed sufficient action.
What did Eriksson make of it all? He laughed dismissively over dinner with his assistant, Tord Grip, but would have been far from amused had he heard what was said before the meeting, when there was broad support for one of his most trenchant critics who declaimed: ‘It’s time we were looking for a new coach as well as a chief executive. We need honourable, straightforward leadership.’
On a strictly non-attributable basis, senior football correspondents were told that Eriksson would be on trial in England’s first two World Cup qualifying games, away to Austria and Poland in September. Failure to win either of these would provide an excuse to sack him for footballing reasons. Ms Alam, who had been privy to the FA’s thought processes from ‘pillow talk’ when Palios was her lover, said they thought Eriksson was ‘more trouble than he was worth’. They believed his ‘sexual shenanigans detracted from his job’. Her advice was to get out before they got him.
Predictably, the England team leapt to the support of their beleaguered coach, but history tells us that players are motivated mostly by self-interest, and always rush to speak up for the man who picks them. They backed Bobby Robson, Terry Venables and, to a lesser extent, Kevin Keegan until they left, when it quickly became a case of: ‘The king is dead, long live the king.’ Claudio Ranieri, at Chelsea, was another good example.
The reserves, who rarely get a game, even when Beckham and company are playing poorly, are nowhere near as supportive, and one former England captain, who played throughout Euro 2004, told me, on the understanding that he was not identified: ‘We could qualify for tournaments with my dad as manager. Sven is paid all that money to win the big games – Brazil, France and Portugal – not the qualifiers, and the fact is we haven’t done that.’
Elsewhere in this book there is glowing testimony to Eriksson’s ability and success at club level. Unfortunately for England, in two major tournaments he has failed to live up to his reputation in the very different world of international management, and he seems unlikely to have another chance. The mystique that served him well in the early stages of his management has been stripped away by the passage of time and, in the places that matter, increasing familiarity was bringing with it something dangerously close to contempt.
CHAPTER ONE ‘PERDENTE DI SUCCESSO’ (THE SUCCESSFUL LOSER)
The epithet the Italian media accorded Sven-Goran Eriksson during the 13 years he plied his trade in their country sprang to mind after England’s second successive elimination from a major tournament at the quarter-final stage. When the Football Association recruited him in November 2000, at unprecedented expense, they expected sustained progress. Getting no further than the last eight of a European Championship won by Greece was definitely not what had been envisaged.
The administrators at Soho Square discussed England’s disappointing performance at Euro 2004 upon their return, and there was criticism of Eriksson’s management. It had not gone unnoticed that while the FA had the best-paid coach in the world, it clearly did not have the best coach. It was the cause of some embarrassment when a league table of remuneration revealed that Luis Felipe Scolari, who had won the World Cup with Brazil before taking Portugal to the European final, earned £1.1m a year to Eriksson’s £4m. Worse still, Otto Rehhagel, who was appointed at roughly the same time as Eriksson, had brought Greece from nowhere to European pre-eminence on just £490,000 per annum.
The FA considered the fact that France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain and Sweden, among others, had all changed their coach, for one reason or another, after the tournament. While privately rueful about getting railroaded into handing their man an extended, enhanced contract before Euro 2004, when he threatened to decamp to Chelsea, they were not, pre-‘Fariagate’, seriously tempted to follow the trend.
The chief executive who had pushed Eriksson’s appointment through, Adam Crozier, had long gone, and his successor, Mark Palios, was nowhere near as enamoured with him, yet the equable Swede survived for a number of reasons, which may be enumerated as follows:
1. Arsenal’s David Dein, the most influential of all the FA mandarins, remained staunch. Dein had effectively blocked moves to replace Kevin Keegan with Arsene Wenger, who initially had been the choice of the head-hunting sub-committee, and had gone to Rome with Crozier to secure Eriksson’s early release from Lazio. He was standing by his man.
2. The respect Eriksson had from the players and his popularity with them impressed his employers. Despite the shortcomings of some of their football, the England team felt they were unlucky to go out to Portugal in the quarter-final in the light of Sol Campbell’s dubiously disallowed goal and the early loss to injury of Wayne Rooney. It was easy for the FA to concur.
3. England’s players were overplayed at club level. The excuse was tediously familiar, but a valid one nevertheless. It was not only David Beckham and Steven Gerrard who looked tired after a demanding season, none of Real Madrid’s ‘galacticos’ did themselves justice at the tournament, and it was surely no coincidence that the winners, Greece, had not been burdened by lengthy Champions’ League commitments.
4. Sacking, and paying up Eriksson, who had a new contract with another four years to run, would be ruinously expensive, and there was no obvious replacement to hand. Wenger had said he intended to stay with Arsenal for another season at least, and although Steve McClaren (Middlesbrough), Alan Curbishley (Charlton) and Sam Allardyce (Bolton) had their advocates, it was generally believed that there was no English candidate ready for the job. Fanciful suggestions that Scolari or Rehhagel might be engaged were no more than that. Not only were they committed to Portugal and Greece respectively, neither spoke any English.
From Eriksson’s point of view, although he has made no secret of his preference for the day-today involvement of club football, the jobs he coveted most, at Chelsea, Manchester United, Real Madrid and Juventus, were no longer available. In the circumstances, coach and employers were both content to soldier on. That said, there was an acknowledgement that England had under-achieved in Portugal. They had travelled with high hopes, only for the country’s best crop of good young players for a generation to return with tails lodged firmly between their legs, using a side door to avoid supporters who had turned out to meet them at Luton airport.
Gary Lineker, no Eriksson fan, was not alone in laying the blame squarely at the well-heeled size nines of the coach and David Beckham. The former England captain said: ‘England looked jaded. We couldn’t keep the ball and defended too deep, but the most disturbing thing was how we proved that we have no Plan B. Plan A was to allow Wayne Rooney to play opponents virtually on his own, filling up all the space between the forwards and midfield, as well as scoring most of the goals. When Rooney went off, we didn’t know what to do. We lost all shape and there was no link man to the forwards. The whole back four just stood practically on David James’ toes, where any sort of contact on the ball from the attacker is likely to end in a goal.
‘England made that mistake throughout the tournament, and I kept waiting for them to get it right. It’s just basic stuff, and you have to raise a question mark against the coach when such things are continually allowed to happen. England also suffered from having David Beckham clearly not fit. He had a very poor tournament, and that was down to a lack of conditioning. To put it bluntly, he was off the pace, and a shadow of the player I saw in his first six months at Real Madrid.’
The FA’s response came from their executive director, David Davies, who said: ‘We are lucky to have Sven – and we’re proud of “Becks”. People very quickly forget, in the disappointment of going out of a tournament, that Sven is a manager many teams around the world covet. He is licking his wounds at the moment, but he has told us he is already looking forward to the next World Cup. Everybody knows David Beckham has had a difficult time recently, but he is immensely proud to be captain of England, and we are immensely proud to have him.’
The party line was unconvincing. It was true that Eriksson had been coveted, and clandestinely