but somebody who had really achieved, wherever he had been. We wanted it all – international credibility, tactical nous, man-management expertise and the ability to handle the media. We were looking for respect within the game and the right personality and cultural profile for international football, where the highs are incredibly high, the lows really low, and there’s a lot of time between games to fret over a bad result or get over-excited by a good one. We needed somebody who could cope with both extremes in a very levelheaded way. An emotional person over-reacts, and it becomes a rollercoaster existence. A calm personality is essential for international management.
‘I started with a long list, then broke it down and said to the committee: “There is a maximum of five who could meet our criteria and do the job.” At first I had people on the list who seemed to be good candidates, but then we thought: “Hang on, have they genuinely got all this?” The truth was that not many had.’ While others scratched their heads and dithered, Crozier drove the process forward. ‘I said: “Right, this is the short list. Before we go any further, does anyone disagree? No? Right, leave it with me, I will go away and look at this lot and find out everything I need to know about them.”’
Ridsdale remembers the sequence of events rather differently. According to him, he proposed Bobby Robson, who became the sub-committee’s first choice, ahead of Eriksson. The former Leeds chairman told me: ‘After the Germany game, on the Monday, Adam asked me, and the others, if we would form the sub-committee. We flew out to Finland and all the members of the sub-committee were there, apart from David Dein, and we thought it was a good opportunity to have our first meeting. We got together in the team’s hotel, and Adam produced a flip chart with a clean sheet of paper – nobody’s name was on it. He divided the board into four sections: English managers, non-English managers working in England, foreign managers and I think the fourth category was up and coming. On the English side, we had Bobby Robson, Terry Venables, Roy Hodgson and Howard Wilkinson, with a question mark against him. Of those working in England but non-English, we had Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and Gerard Houllier, the foreigners were Eriksson, Johann Cruyff, Marcello Lippi and Hector Cuper, and in the up-and-coming category were Martin O’Neill, David O’Leary, Peter Taylor and Bryan Robson. These names were solicited by Adam and written on the board by him. He said: “These are the categories, do we agree? Can anyone think of anybody else? No? Right.” So we went through the names, and everybody agreed that the ideal was an Englishman with another young Englishman backing him up. We had Bobby Robson and Peter Taylor as manager and heir apparent. There was a long debate about whether Terry [Venables] should be considered, and everybody agreed that if “New England” was to represent what the FA wanted it to stand for, we couldn’t discount Terry’s non-footballing reputation, whatever its rights and wrongs. The view was that, given what we were trying to achieve at the FA, we had to have a new beginning, and therefore Terry was not appropriate. That was unanimous. Whether it was fair to him or not, the baggage that came with him counted against him, and he was out of it.
‘Having debated all the rights and wrongs, we came out of it with two names: Bobby Robson and Sven. The agreement was that Adam would go away and seek permission from Newcastle to talk to Robson, to see if he was an option. We weren’t just talking about having him for one or two games, as was widely reported at the time, we wanted him on a permanent basis. There was, though, a suggestion that if Bobby would only agree to do it for the rest of the season, that would buy us time.’
Ridsdale, now Chairman at Barnsley, adds that Crozier was told: ‘If you go to Newcastle and get permission to speak to him, and Bobby says: “I’m not interested, but I’m prepared to help you out as a stopgap,” that would be better than nothing. Adam was sent away from the meeting with two alternatives to explore: Bobby Robson with a young English coach, or if not, Sven. After that first meeting, Bobby was in front of Sven. Everybody’s perception was: “Ideally, we appoint an Englishman. If not, we’ll go overseas.” Bobby only ceased to be the front runner when Newcastle were approached and said they wouldn’t release him.’
Crozier denies much of this and, in fairness, it is his version of events that ties in with that of Noel White. During the course of his research, Crozier said, he relied heavily on the advice of Sir Alex Ferguson, who had ruled himself out of the running for the job, but was willing to assist the FA in their quest.
‘I spent a lot of time with Alex, who was tremendously helpful. The night Manchester United played PSV Eindhoven in the Champions’ League (18 October 2000, seven days after the Finland game) he gave me a couple of hours at Old Trafford. When I went to see him I actually had a dual purpose, although nobody knew it at the time. I went to pick Alex’s brain about getting the right manager, but also to get his agreement to let us have Steve McClaren, his assistant, as part of our new coaching team. I wanted continuity, a long-term strategy, and I’d got the sub-committee to agree that we’d have three or four coaches under the manager, none of whom would be “The Chosen One”, as Bryan Robson was under Terry Venables, but any one of whom might emerge as the heir apparent over a period of time. For me, you see, there were two searches going on at the same time. Everyone thought I was looking for an England manager, but I was looking for a manager and his back-up. As it turned out, I ended up getting the support team first: Steve from United and Peter Taylor from Leicester, plus Sammy Lee, from Liverpool, for the Under-21s.’
When it came to the top job, Ferguson helped to point Crozier in Eriksson’s direction. ‘Having found out as much as I could about potential targets, and having listened to what expert witnesses like Alex had to say, I became absolutely convinced that Sven was our man after that first week. Alex was very helpful. We also talked about his players’ feelings about the England set-up. When they went back to Manchester United after international duty with us, what were they saying about us? From what they had told him, and from what he had seen, what did Alex think about our way of doing things? Where were we going wrong? That helped us to identify the sort of person we needed to fix it.’
Where Crozier and Ridsdale agree is that after the first week, Eriksson topped the wanted list. Crozier says the peripatetic Hodgson (ex-Malmo, Switzerland, Grasshoppers, Internazionale, Blackburn, Udinese etc) fell at the first hurdle, failing the ‘sustained success’ test, and Ferguson and Houllier were discounted on grounds of unavailability. So, too, was Wenger. Arsenal were naturally keen to keep the manager who led them to the Double in 1998, and the presence of Dein, their vice-chairman, on the sub-committee inevitably led to suggestions of a conflict of interests. The smooth poise for which Dein is renowned was disturbed momentarily when Wenger went on Sky TV and said he could not understand why England had not asked about him.
Before cottoning on to Eriksson, the media had made the Arsenal man the favourite for the job. So was he considered or not? Dein havered, saying: ‘He [Wenger] had gone public many, many times with the fact that he was going to respect his contract with Arsenal, and this was all about the art of the possible. Who could we get? There was no point wasting our energies on somebody we couldn’t get.’
When the sub-committee met for the second and last time, Eriksson was ‘a clear front runner’, Crozier says. The fans’ favourite, Venables, had disappeared off the radar. ‘If you measure his record against all our criteria, he didn’t stack up as well as Sven. It’s a subjective thing, and I’m sure there are people who still disagree, but if you are a leader, you have to back your judgement. The only time I got upset during the whole process was when some journalist friends of Terry’s wrote that we’d chosen integrity as one of our criteria specifically to rule him out, as if he didn’t have any. I found that upsetting for him because: (a) I wouldn’t want a friend to write that about me, and (b) it wasn’t true, so it was very unfair. We were looking for a broad spectrum of qualities, and my hunch was that Sven had them all – or at least more so than anybody else we were considering.’
Eriksson had been Crozier’s choice from day one. ‘That wasn’t the case with everyone on the sub-committee,’ he acknowledged. ‘Peter [Ridsdale] was always for Bobby, and initially other people had other views. At our first meeting some said we should go for Alex Ferguson, others Arsene Wenger, and there was a lot of discussion about Johann Cruyff. But at that second meeting, it became unanimous for Sven. I have to say I did corral everyone in, admittedly with David Dein’s assistance. It was a case of: “OK, is everyone now 100 per