Читать книгу Sven-Goran Eriksson - Joe Lovejoy - Страница 12

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 24 of the 26 matches in his breakthrough season, and Olle Nordin, the team captain and engine room artificer.

Eriksson says of that first season: ‘During my first year, IFK were regarded as a rebellious bunch, and we suffered disciplinary problems, with too many bookings and sendings-off. But we overcame that by hard work, and in the end our behaviour was impeccable, on and off the field. We travelled a lot in the cup, and we used the trips to build a winning culture. Nobody moaned about waiting times, depressing airports or grotty hotel rooms.’

A rebellious bunch? Schiller, now a football agent, wouldn’t go quite that far, but admits: ‘We came to be looked upon like rock stars, and after games we would all go out for a few drinks. I have to say we did have fun on all our trips.’ The downside of this good-time culture saw Schiller spend a month in prison for a drink-driving conviction, when he took his car in search of further refreshment after a party at home. ‘It was a long time ago, and I learned my lesson,’ he says. Eriksson said his piece at the time, but after that was steadfastly supportive, and welcomed the prodigal son back to the club immediately upon his release. ‘He is a very understanding man, and it was not a problem after that,’ Schiller told me.

That first season, Stromberg had been the major find. He told me: ‘Because I was only young, and already 6 ft 5 in, I’d had a lot of back trouble the previous season, when I was 18. But when Sven took over, he promoted me straight away to the first-team squad, and after a couple of months he put me in the team, in the centre of midfield. I couldn’t believe it, because I’d had so many problems with injuries and it took a lot of courage for him to do it. Straight away he left out some of the older players and gave the younger ones their chance.’

Of Eriksson’s early difficulties, Stromberg says: ‘When he arrived, he was unknown, which was one problem. Another was that he made us play in the English style – long balls and pressing the opposition all over the pitch. In Sweden, the national team and the bigger clubs were used to the short passing game, the continental way, and for a long time there was much criticism of Sven’s way of playing.’

The following season, Gothenburg dropped back to third in the league again, behind Osters Vaxjo and Malmo, while their performance in the European Cup Winners’ Cup was no better than ordinary. After making hard work of beating Ireland’s Waterford and Panionios of Greece, both on a 2–1 aggregate, they fell apart against Terry Neill’s Arsenal, and were trounced 5–1 at Highbury in the first leg, in March 1980. The North Bank was shocked into silence when Torbjorn Nilsson opened the scoring on the half-hour, but Alan Sunderland equalized within a minute, and after 35 minutes Arsenal were ahead, through David Price. Sunderland again, Liam Brady and Willie Young were also on target to make it a deflating night for Eriksson and his team. The return, in Sweden, was goalless, and remarkable only for a nasty scare for Neill and his players when their plane’s landing gear malfunctioned, causing their first approach to Gothenburg airport to be aborted.

It had not been a good season, and criticism was mounting. ‘Sven’s second season was more of a problem than his first,’ Stromberg says. ‘There was a big debate about our long-ball game, but we kept playing our way, and the national team stuck to theirs. Sven is very hard-headed, he will always keep to his way. By this time, the team and the whole club were behind him, but there was a lot of criticism from the fans and the press. Eventually, of course, everybody in Sweden went over to the English style. It all started just before Sven. Bob Houghton was at Malmo and Roy Hodgson at Halmstad, and they first brought that way of playing to Sweden. It became Sven’s way, too, and it brought good results for Gothenburg for the next ten years.’

For 1981, Eriksson strengthened his backroom staff with the recruitment of a new assistant, Gunder Bengtsson, and the team by signing three internationals. Sweden’s goalkeeper, Thomas Wernersson, joined from Atvidaberg, and Stig Fredriksson and Hakan Sandberg, defender and striker respectively, arrived from Vasteras and Orebro. Finance director Carlsson says: ‘When Sven joined us we already had quite a few good young players, so it was quite a good situation for a new trainer, but after a year or so he came to us with his proposals for improving the team. We backed his judgement as far as we could, depending on the finance involved. We were very impressed with the way he handled himself there. He would say to us: “This is a player I want to sign, but if we haven’t got enough money, I’ll accept that.”’

The consequent improvement was not quite enough, Gothenburg finishing second in the league again, four points behind Osters Vaxjo, and so far, Eriksson had done not much more than satisfy minimum expectations. Managerial take-off came with the annus mirablis that was 1982. That year, Gothenburg did the league and cup double and triumphed against all odds in the UEFA Cup, becoming the first Swedish club to win a European trophy. By this stage the erstwhile ‘Mr Who?’ had full and enthusiastic backing in the dressing room. Hysen says: ‘Even for a Swede, Sven was amazingly calm. In all the time I played for him, he never once raised his voice, and I can’t say that about any other manager. I used to imagine that he had a secret darkened room somewhere, and that he would go there on his own and shout, scream and kick the walls and trash the place. I know Swedes are supposed to be relaxed about things, but I thought it was impossible for a man to be that calm all the time.

‘On the other hand, Sven is also the best motivator I ever played for, and that is what you’d call a typical English quality. He treated everyone like adults, and they respected him for his honesty. If a player was dropped, Sven would take him to one side and explain his reasons. That approach made you even more determined to do well for the guy. He was an expert at man-management.’

Bengtsson, two years Eriksson’s senior, was manager of Molde, in Norway, when we spoke in April 2002. He told me: ‘We’ve known each other since 1975, when some mutual friends introduced us. I was player-coach at Torsby, Sven’s home town, before he took me to Gothenburg as his number two. We had a few problems at first, with results not going so well, but we had good players and eventually it all came right. Gothenburg had always been a team who played attacking football, but until Sven took charge they weren’t well organized, and so they hadn’t been winning anything. Implementing any new style takes time, all the more so when it is as unpopular as Sven’s was at first, but when results picked up, everything we were doing was accepted.’

Stromberg by now had developed into a key player, for club and country; indeed Gothenburg as a unit had matured nicely and were approaching their collective peak. They were still part-timers (Hysen was an electrician, Tord Holmgren a plumber), and were patronized by the European elite, but everybody was about to sit up and take notice. The first round of the UEFA Cup brought a routine demolition of Finland’s Haka Valkeakosi, and there was no hint of the glory nights to come when Sturm Graz, of Austria, pushed the Swedes all the way before going out on an aggregate of 5–4. By the third round, however, Gothenburg were into their stride, beating Dinamo Bucharest at home (3–1) and away (1–0), and when they eliminated Valencia in the quarter-final it was clear that they were a force to be reckoned with. Stromberg remembers the trip to Spain with much amusement. He says: ‘You have to remember that the club didn’t really have the money to compete at this level. When we played Valencia away, we didn’t have any directors with us. The club had severe financial problems at the time, and the four directors were all standing down. For nearly a month we had no administration, and when we went to Valencia there were no directors, just the Swedish journalists with us.

‘There was a formal dinner the night before the match, and we had nobody to sit at the table with the Valencia directors, so we took the club doctor, a radio reporter and the kit man. It was unbelievable, to see these guys eating with the people who owned one of the biggest clubs in Spain.’

The financial situation had improved by the time the semi-final brought Gothenburg up against Germany’s Kaiserslautern, who had just inflicted the heaviest-ever European defeat (5–0) on Real Madrid, and were therefore hot favourites. ‘We were getting 50,000 gates for the European games, and Valencia had eased the cashflow problem,’ Stromberg explained. ‘Everything really started to come together that month. We were saved, as a big club, by our European run.’ Again Eriksson’s game plan worked to perfection. The draw and away goal he wanted from the first leg in Germany shifted the odds in Gothenburg’s favour for the return, and a 2–1 win at home completed the upset. ‘At that time,’ Stromberg says, ‘I think we could have taken on almost any team in the world. We were very confident, we had a lot of good players and we had a method we all believed in. Everybody believed in the things we were doing, the way we were playing. In Europe, the teams we played were having a lot of trouble with Sven’s pressing game. They were used to being allowed to build up their passing from their own half, without pressure, but we started challenging for the ball very high up the field, and worked very hard at it. It also helped, of course, that there was a lot of quality in that side.’

The final was against another Bundesliga team, Hamburg, who were stronger than Kaiserslautern, and confident of winning with something to spare. Only once before had a Swedish club reached a European final, and the poverty of Malmo’s performance in losing 1–0 to Nottingham Forest in the 1979 European Cup Final was not about to strike fear into Franz Beckenbauer and company. Bengtsson says: ‘To be honest, getting to the final was a surprise, even for us, but there was a good feeling, a good spirit about that team – the best I’ve ever known. We also had an advantage. When a team like Gothenburg are coming up from nowhere, nobody really believes they are going to go all the way, and obviously it helps if you have a good team and nobody really takes you seriously. In the quarter-finals, nobody had said much or thought much about us, so Valencia expected to win. You could tell that. It was the same in the semi-finals, and particularly in the final. Nobody thought we could play as well as we did. We took them by surprise.’

Gothenburg were ten games unbeaten coming into the final, with their twin strikers, Torbjorn Nilsson and Dan Corneliusson, in prolific form. The first leg, in the Ullevi stadium, left the tie intriguingly balanced. Tord Holmgren’s only goal of the match, in the 87th minute, gave the underdogs a lead to defend, but Hamburg thought they could easily overcome such a slender deficit at home. ‘Nobody gave us a chance over there,’ Eriksson recalled. ‘Hamburg had flags printed with “Hamburg SV winners of the UEFA Cup ‘82” all over them. You could buy them before the game. I still have one at home.’

His own players certainly regarded themselves as rank outsiders, albeit in a two-horse race. Stromberg says: ‘An hour and a half before the game, Sven told us: “You know, we have a good chance here.” We all looked at him thinking “Yeah, yeah. A good chance. How?” He said: “We’re a team who score a lot of goals, and we’re always likely to get one. Then, if we get one, they’ll have to get three.” Sven reminded us that nobody had scored three times against us all season, and that got us thinking. We turned to one another with looks that said: “Yeah, he’s right, we do have a chance here.”’

Teutonic speculation focused on whether Beckenbauer would play and pick up the one trophy that had eluded him. Two weeks away from retirement ‘The Kaiser’ had only just recovered from a bruised kidney, and had been among the substitutes a few days earlier, for the 5–0 drubbing of Werder Bremen. Ernst Happel, Hamburg’s Austrian coach, said: ‘There is a possibility Beckenbauer will play, but there is often a hitch between theory and practice.’ Too true; the great man never appeared. Nevertheless, Happel still had three formidable German internationals – Manni Kaltz, Felix Magath and Horst Hrubesch – at his command. Victory would be a formality.

The trip had inauspicious beginnings for Glenn Schiller. ‘I’d forgotten my boots, left them in Sweden,’ he says. ‘Sven wasn’t pleased. He said: “The only thing you have to bring with you is your boots, and you can’t be relied on to do that.” He made me buy new ones.’ Keen to get out of the manager’s way, Schiller was sitting in the toilet as the final preparations were made. ‘I was starting on the bench, so I was in no great hurry, and I was sat in there reading the match programme, with all the adverts for Hamburg cup-winning souvenirs. You could see that they had taken too much for granted, and definitely underestimated us.

‘When I came out, I could hear the crowd yelling and the dressing room was empty. I was locked in. I was banging on the door, trying to get out, but nobody came, and in the end I had to climb over the door. I was probably in there on my own for ten minutes. Just as I got out, Glenn Hysen was injured, and Svennis was asking everybody on the bench “Where’s Schiller?” They looked around and told him: “He’s coming.” I was running around the track and was sent straight on, so you could say I did my warm-up in the toilet! I didn’t get to sit on the bench, I sat on the throne instead.’

Hamburg started urgently, seeking the early goal which would square the tie and give them the initiative but, against all expectations, it was Gothenburg who played the better football. The Germans were too hurried, making mistakes which were ruthlessly exploited. After 26 minutes Eriksson’s underdogs were ahead, Tommy Holmgren, the younger brother of Tord, breaking down the left and crossing for Corneliusson to score with a powerful shot. Hamburg’s morale nosedived, Gothenburg’s soared, and the issue was put beyond doubt after 61 minutes, when Nilsson, who was outstanding throughout, outran Magath over 40 yards before making it 2–0 on the night. The Swedes were now 3–0 up on aggregate with away goals in their favour. Hamburg needed four goals in half an hour, but were a broken team, and disappointed fans were streaming out of the Volksparkstadion when Nilsson was fouled inside the penalty area and Stig Fredriksson scored from the spot.

Stromberg says: ‘It was one of those nights when everything is just perfect. Torbjorn Nilsson, our centre-forward, was probably the best striker in Europe for two or three years around that time, but I don’t think it was down to him, or the midfield, or the defence. Everything, everybody, was just perfect. I remember Hrubesch turning to me during the game and saying: “You know, we could play you ten times and never win.” On our form that night, he was right. We were that good. Every player knew what to do, where to be at any given time. Throughout the 90 minutes, I don’t remember any player being caught out of position once. Sven had prepared us that well.’

After 4,000 exultant Swedes had acclaimed their heroes on a lap of honour, Eriksson said: ‘I’m the happiest man alive. I thought we might sneak it 1–0, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we could come to Hamburg and score three.’ Happel offered no excuses. The first goal had been crucial, fracturing his team’s morale, he said. ‘In the end, they could have scored four or five.’

For winning the UEFA Cup, the Gothenburg players received £50,000 a man on top of their basic salaries of £1,500 per month. Schiller immediately put a big hole in his bonus by buying a Porsche. ‘Glenn Stromberg bought one too,’ he said, chuckling at the memory. ‘We were the two single guys in the team, you understand.’

Eriksson was also in the outside lane. Suddenly all Europe had heard of ‘Sven Who?’, and Gothenburg couldn’t hope to keep him. But he had built a young team good enough to dominate Swedish football for the next five years under Bengtsson, who succeeded him, and to win the UEFA again in 1987.