Sven Goran Eriksson: Too much of a gentleman for English football?

Sven Goran Eriksson, it turned out, faced his own death with greater respect than he ever received from the English press.

Farewell then, Svennis. We all have our sell-by date and you've met yours. If I may be candid for a moment, has anyone ever had a death as elegant as Sven Goran Eriksson? At 76 years of age, it was perhaps a few years too soon. But he got to manage Liverpool that one time, he carried out a beautifully weighted interview with Sky Sports in which he face his own mortality with bravery and perspective, and then he slipped away, a life well lived, a legacy ensured.

There will always be hollow tears from the press at time like this. Whenever a former England manager passes, you'll get the same selective amnesia their own role in, at a point in the past, being as unspeakably horrible about them, with the intention of making them a figure of national ridicule so that their positions became untenable and they could no longer continue in it.

Sven was a particular target because he committed one the most heinous offences, that of being a confirmed non-Englishman in charge of an England men's football team. Strangely, in the apparently less needlessly cruel world of women's football Sarina Wiegmann was simply accepted into the manager's position bad went on to lift the major trophy which has escaped the clutches of every men's team manager to have a go in more than half a century.

He arrived into the England manager's job with in a familiar state of flux. Giving the job to Kevin Keegan plus Vibes was always a slightly strange decision which hinted at the lack of imagination at the FA at the time. After Glenn Hoddle and the strangeness of entire Eileen Drury affair, Keegan was the tabloid desire manifest, hellzapoppin’ attacking football which would show Johnny Foreigner a thing or two about spunk.

Well, Portugal were certainly shown a thing or two for about twenty minutes at Euro 2000 before coming back to win 3-2. A 1-0 win against Germany in their couldn't even really paper over the cracks. It was a terrible game between two fairly terrible teams. A late penalty against Romania in their final group match put them out of the competition. England's record of never having got past the group stages of a European Championship unless hosting remained intact.

Keegan stayed on regardless. For a couple of months, at least, before the pathetic fallacy of losing 1-0 to Germany in the in the final match at the old Wembley Stadium in the pouring rain of the last match. His subsequent resignation caught the FA off-guard. Hardly surprising, since it had first been offered in a toilet cubicle somewhere in the bowels of Wembley Stadium. It took three months for them to appoint his replacement, a space that was filled by an increasingly xenophobic-sounding background of white noise.

“We sell our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer-throwers who spend half their year living in total darkness”, as Jeff Powell put it in the Daily Mail in an article which highlighted an important fundamental difference between how the elder statesmen of what would become legacy media and younger supporters.

There was an ethical case that could be made against hiring a foreign manager, that any nation that considers itself to be a ‘great’ football nation should be able to produce at least one manager with the ability and the skillset to do this most peculiar of jobs. It was a symbol of a broader decline in the standard of the English game.

When Premier League clubs became able to buy in the best players on the planet, a lot of English players were simply squeezed downwards in the marketplace. Managers weren’t being overlooked because they were English. They were being overlooked because when clubs started to realise that they could also bring in the best coaches from abroad, they didn’t have the required skill set.

But in January it was confirmed that Sven-Goran Eriksson would be taking on the impossible job. And the following month he got off to a flying start, with a 3-0 win against Spain. It was the first of five consecutive wins to kick off his time in charge. With Wembley vacated, the national team were on the road. The Spain match was played at Villa Park, and other home matches that year would be played at Pride Park, Anfield, St James’ Park and Old Trafford that year.

Eriksson’s run came to an end with a home defeat against the Netherlands at White Hart Lane in the middle of August 2001. A month later England had to play their return match against Germany, away from home. What followed was certainly their best performance since the Netherlands match at Euro 96, and a strong contender for their greatest of all-time. A 5-1 win in Germany, and not just anywhere in Germany; at the Olympiastadion in Munich, the scene of their 1974 World Cup triumph.

But this was only three points, and England still had work to do in order to undo the damage done by their dismal start under Keegan. By the time of their final matches, England and Germany were clear at the top of the group and level on points, with England now having both the head-to-head and goal difference advantage. England at home against Greece, Germany at home against Finland. If England won, they were through as group winners. But if Germany got a better result, they qualified. And England were labouring against Greece. Angelos Charisteas gave Greece a 1-0 lead, and even when Teddy Sheringham levelled midway through the second half, Demis Nikolaidis restored their lead a minute later.

Three minutes into stoppage-time came a big step forward on David Beckham’s redemption arc. His castigators ran out of steam and dwindled away, Beckham himself doing his part by completing an unprecedented treble of Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League at the end of the 1998/99 season. And with his life being treated as something approaching the ultimate reality TV show, it became inevitable that he would ultimately get the opportunity to redeem himself.

Just outside the Greek penalty area, in front of the Stretford End, England had a free-kick. It was a one-shot deal for Beckham and he nailed it, arcing a powerful shot with such precision that the Greek goalkeeper didn’t even move. At the same time, news came through that Germany had only been able to get a goalless draw against Finland in Gelsenkirchen. England had qualified for the 2002 World Cup as group winners, against all odds.

But by the time that England set foot on the pitch at the Saitama Stadium in Japan against Sweden the following summer, much of the confidence of that September or October had dissipated. It couldn’t be denied that Beckham’s moment of brilliance had masked an otherwise muddled England performance, and they followed the Greece match by winning just one of the six matches that they played in the build-up to the finals.

Even the David Beckham redemption arc had stalled. Beckham broke a bone in his food while playing for Manchester United in a Champions League match at the end of April 2002, but just about made it back to fitness in time. On top of that, the draw had placed them in a “Group of Death” alongside Argentina, Sweden and Nigeria.

There were few grounds to feel particularly optimistic by the end of the first match, either, an unimpressive 1-1 draw with Sweden. But next up were Argentina, a team of talented players who weren’t quite clicking, either. A minute before half-time, Michael Owen was felled inside the Argentina penalty - so far as the referee was concerned - and Beckham’s arc got back on track when he drilled in the penalty which turned out to be the only goal of the game. The reaction back in England was a little muted. Again, they’d got the result but this time from a poor game. They drew their third game 0-0 with Nigeria to qualify in second place on goals scored behind Sweden, while Argentina went out.

But they put in an accomplished performance in the second round against Denmark, sweeping into a 3-0 half-time lead and then just shutting up shop in the second half. Their run came to an end with a 2-1 defeat, a match best remembered for the Ronaldinho free-kick that looped over David Seaman and into the goal five minutes into the second half, which turned out to be the winning goal.

This does rather overlook the fact that Ronaldinho was sent off eight minutes after scoring for a foul, and that England were still scarcely able to even create any opportunities, despite playing for more than half an hour with a one player advantage. Brazil were the better team, and England had probably gone further than most realistically expected, considering the draw and their pre-tournament form.

The biggest peculiarity about England’s two-year toil towards Euro 2004 was a lack of goals. They failed to score more than two goals in any of their qualification matches, a fact made all the stranger when we recall that two of those matches were against Liechtenstein. They qualified, appropriately enough, with a goalless draw against Turkey in Istanbul, having scored just fourteen goals in eight matches. The new starlet at this time was Wayne Rooney, powerful forward who’d burst onto the scene in style with Everton in 2002 but who would leave for Manchester United in the summer of 2004 for a British record transfer fee of £25.6m.

Results didn’t improve with qualification, with one win in their five remaining matches in the build-up to Euro 2004, a 6-1 win against Iceland which followed defeats against Denmark and Sweden and draws with Portugal and Japan. But England’s opening match of the tournament was arguably the highest-profile of the group stages. France were the defending holders of the trophy, and nine of the players in their squad played in the Premier League.

It turned out to be an appropriately dramatic evening. A header from Frank Lampard gave England a first half lead, and when Wayne Rooney was brought down with 17 minutes to play they had an opportunity to put the game beyond France once and for all. But France goalkeeper Fabien Barthez saved Beckham’s penalty and France clawed their way back into the match with two Zinedine Zidane goals - a free-kick and a penalty - in stoppage-time to win it.

This result turned the heat up under Eriksson, but his team’s reaction in their other two group matches couldn’t have been much more positive. Rooney scored four in two games as England beat Switzerland 3-0 and Croatia 4-2 to qualify for the quarter-finals. Rooney’s mixture of explosively aggressive movement and intelligent use of the ball was making him one of the stand-out players of the group stages, and these two wins couldn’t have looked much different to the nervy closing stages of their opening match.

This result turned the heat up under Eriksson, but his team’s reaction in their other two group matches couldn’t have been much more positive. Rooney scored four in two games as England beat Switzerland 3-0 and Croatia 4-2 to qualify for the quarter-finals. Rooney’s mixture of explosively aggressive movement and intelligent use of the ball was making him one of the stand-out players of the group stages, and these two wins couldn’t have looked much different to the nervy closing stages of their opening match.

But disappointment was just around the corner. Despite taking an early lead in their quarter-final match against the host nation Portugal, a late equaliser pegged them back, with Rooney having had to be withdrawn during the first half after a tangle with Andrade left with him with a broken bone in his foot, just as had happened to David Beckham in the build up to the 2002 World Cup.

Portugal took the lead five minutes into the second period of extra-time through Rui Costa, but Frank Lampard levelled things up and took the match to a penalty shootout, where a by now increasingly familiar story played out. David Beckham lost his footing in his run-up and ballooned his kick over the crossbar and Darius Vassell had his saved by the Portuguese goalkeeper Ricardo, who stepped up to send Portugal through to the semi-finals.

By this point, we were into the era of the “Golden Generation”, a phrase first coined by FA Chief Executive Adam Crozier to define a generation of fabulously successful young club players who had come through at clubs such as Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool during the mid to late 1990s. These players were hyped as a group that could challenge the likes of France, Italy, Spain and Germany for supremacy of Europe and beyond, but the team never reached its potential with a series of underwhelming and disjointed performances.

It would later emerge that the latter period of this generation would see the England camp riven by club-based rivalries, out of control egos, all of which combined to ultimately create a team that played as though governed by a fear of failure. Over the years between 2004 and 2016, playing for England would become onerous, a job that few seemed to actually want to do.

England qualified for the 2006 World Cup finals with no great difficulty. With two qualification places available from their group they finished a point clear at the top from Poland, but ten points ahead of third-placed Austria. There was one defeat - a 1-0 loss in Belfast against Northern Ireland in September 2005 - but although the actual performances could be a little stagnant at times they did at least keep winning, and occasionally they showed flashes of excellence, such as a gritty 3-2 friendly win against Argentina in Geneva in November 2005.

But the tabloid press were focussing their attention elsewhere. The explosively raised profile of the players had brought considerable interest in their wives and girlfriends - “WAGs”, as they became known - whose antics throughout the tournament in Germany received as much attention as the team itself in some corners of the press.

On the pitch, a combination of the heat and a long season seemed to have drained the life out of the players. Despite the pre-tournament hype, England plodded through the competition with a 1-0 win against Paraguay in their opening match followed by a 2-0 win against Trinidad & Tobago in which they had to wait until the 83rd minute for their opening goal, and a 2-2 draw with Sweden which was notable for the mildly chaotic way in which they lost the lead after reclaiming it with five minutes to play and for the superb long range volley from Joe Cole which had given them a 1-0 lead in the first place.

There were few signs of improvement in the first knockout round, another insipid 1-0 win, this time against Ecuador. Rooney remained the talisman, but familiar issues were raising their heads, not least a muddled team formation that seemed to be based on trying to accommodate as many of the higher profile players as possible and hoping for moments of brilliance from them.

This worked, to an extent, with Cole’s goal against Sweden and a David Beckham free-kick winning the Ecuador game, but it came unstuck in the quarter-finals against Portugal. Rooney got himself sent off after 62 minutes for a stamp on Carvalho. The team got to the end of 120 minutes at 0-0, but the Golden Generation had a disastrous penalty shootout, with Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher all missing as Portugal won 3-1.

Sven Goran Eriksson had already announced his departure after the end of this tournament. In January 2006, he had been recorded saying he would be willing to leave England to manage Aston Villa if England won the World Cup after being duped into believing that a wealthy Arab would buy the club and wanted him as their manager. The wealthy "Arab" was in fact the "Fake Sheikh" Mazher Mahmood, an undercover News of the World reporter.

The FA announced that he would be leaving the job, and Eriksson later won a civil case against Mahmood, although it was said at the time that the decision for him to leave after the World Cup had not been related to these allegations. Mahmood was later sentenced to 15 months' imprisonment after being found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, following the collapse of a trial against former singer Tulisa Contostavlos.

Perhaps Sven was too much of a gentleman for the brutish nature of that job at that time. By the time that Gareth Southgate took over a decade later, a decline that started with Sven's departure seemed to have hit terminal velocity. He certainly loved money. He went to League Two and Notts County in pursuit of it in 2009, only for Eriksson to find that the entire purchase of the club that led to him being asked was fundamentally fraudulent. He tore up the remainder of his contract and walked away. The amount of money contractually owed to him by that club could have killed them, had he not done so.

So farewell then, Svennis. Football was a better place for you being it. You never really belonged in the gutter, with so many of those who were writing about you.