Sven-Goran Eriksson understood more than any, perhaps, the power of ordinariness. The down-to-earth, easy charm that characterised him and allowed him to face death with such astonishing equanimity, was sourced to a Swedish upbringing remarkable for the absence of any star markers.
His appointment as England’s first foreign coach was deeply ironic since it placed in control of the national team a figure who could not have been more English in footballing design and influence had he been born in Telford not Torsby. He worshipped at the altar of Roy Hodgson and even in his private life assumed absolute Britishness as a staple of red-top reportage.
However, his appointment marked a departure since it was an admission that the mother country had exhausted its own resources and was in need of some football exotica from abroad. Serie A in Italy provided it, the Premier League of the day, a setting that attracted the game’s best players and coaches.
Amongst his many postings Eriksson had spells at Roma, Fiorentina, Sampdoria and finally Lazio, where he won the Scudetto before joining England in 2001. He had been a target for Blackburn Rovers, enriched by the ambition and millions of steel magnate Jack Walker, a year earlier but was persuaded to stay in the Italian capital, at least until the Football Association knocked on his door.
That was the trigger for little old me to do likewise, sent to the Swedish hinterland by The Mirror to discover the secrets of super Svennis. To step out in Torsby in the municipality of Varmland, close to the Norwegian border 250 miles from the Swedish capital Stockholm, was to understand immediately the Eriksson world view. Little more than a hamlet, Eriksson grew up in a spectacularly unspectacular community, the epitome of order and modesty.
The family home sat back from the road, compact and neat. Though in residence, the parents of the new England manager declined to speak. It was not so much the intrusion they resented as the idea that their son was worthy of the attention at all. It was a common thread. Few in the town could remember Eriksson so small an imprint did he leave in his youth.
Indeed at the local sports club he was remembered more for his command of ski-jumping than football. He gave not a hint that a great manager was among them, and left little trace on the pitch of his grasp of fundamentals. Certainly there was nil sense that he would become one of Sweden’s great sporting exports and global personalities.
He arrived in England as a kind of messiah-figure, an alchemist to finally identify the blend that would turn a golden generation into winners 35 years after England won the World Cup, still our only success.
There were nights of genuine hope when the boots of David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen appeared destined to follow Moore, Charlton, Ball and Peters into legend, to finally escape the void that claimed the nation responsible for shaping the game.
Eriksson began with a 3-0 win against Spain in a friendly at Villa Park in February 2001 and in September that year oversaw a 5-1 win in a World Cup qualifier in Munich. It was only the second time Germany had lost a qualifier at home and seemed to engender the feeling that Eriksson did indeed have the answer to England’s shortcomings in international football.
The idea that he might not reasserted itself in the final match of the qualifying campaign when it required a last-minute free-kick from Beckham against Greece at a packed Old Trafford to seal qualification and thus avoid a play-off against Ukraine. And in the finals in Japan Eriksson finally understood the scale of England’s psychological scarring in defeat to Brazil in the quarter-finals, despite scoring first through Michael Owen and playing the final 33 minutes against ten men following Ronaldinho’s red card.
What should have been the signal to power on became just another entry in the long history of English under-achievement. Eriksson was brought in to change the thinking and aura around the national team, yet ended up reinforcing old doubts.
In the big moments England found a way to fall not rise.
At the 2004 Euros England managed to lose the group opener against France despite leading with 90 minutes on the clock. Though victories over Switzerland and Croatia saw them qualify for the knockout stages England lost once more in the quarters despite scoring first against Portugal. That the execution should be delivered by penalties further underscored the English leanings of the team’s first foreign coach.
England would meet he same fate in the 2006 World Cup losing to the same opponent by the same mechanism. By then Eriksson’s future was already decided, in part by that most English of own goals, the newspaper sting. That upbringing in a remote corner of Sweden could never prepare Eriksson for a life in the spotlight.
The same base instincts and vanity that led him into sundry affairs with women left him vulnerable to flattery and the charms of strangers promising the earth. So it was that in early 2006 Eriksson told The News of the World’s fabled fake sheikh that he would happily manage Aston Villa under the new ownership of a wealthy Arab. Poor Svennis never saw it coming.
There would be further embarrassment at Notts County, where he assumed the position of director of football on the promise of more Middle East cash that never materialised. He did, however, stay on to oversee the takeover by new owner Ray Tew, who described Eriksson as an “absolute gentleman”.
Of course he was, an individual of sound instincts whose only failing was, it seems, to be an ordinary bloke. In that he was not alone.