Читать книгу Sven-Goran Eriksson - Joe Lovejoy - Страница 14

Sven-Goran Eriksson could have come to England nearly 20 years earlier. In May 1984, Tottenham Hotspur were looking for a manager to replace Keith Burkinshaw, and the chairman, Irving Scholar, approached two candidates, one of whom was Eriksson. Scholar told me: ‘Sven was just about to leave Benfica. He said he’d had a meeting with the people at Roma, and that basically he’d shaken hands on a deal, although nothing had been completely finalized. His agent at the time was a nice chap called Borge Lantz, who lived in Portugal, at Cascaes. I approached him because Sven had come to my attention as being a young, bright European coach with a future. He’d been successful at Gothenburg, winning the UEFA Cup, and he’d done well at Benfica. I’d heard a whisper that he was ready to move on, and so I checked him out.

‘I’d just been let down by Alex Ferguson, and I do mean let down. We’d had a few meetings and a lot of conversations, and I’d said to him: “Look, when everything is sorted we’ll shake hands, and that’s it.” He said: “Oh yeah, I’m that type of bloke as well,” so that was fine. Or so I thought. Anyway, we had our last meeting in Paris. We’d agreed the contract, everything. All the “t”s were crossed, all the “i”s dotted, so I said: “Are you ready?” He said he was. We’d both made great play of this thing about the handshake. I put my hand out, we shook hands, and he said, “Right then, that’s it.” I thought “great”, but five or six weeks later I started to get the impression that he was going to let me down. It was when he did that I spoke to Lantz about Eriksson. He said: “Go ahead, have a word with him, here’s his number.” So I called Sven and he made it clear that he had given his word to Roma, but that if the move fell through he would be very interested in coming to England. He went to Roma, and the rest is history. It was a shame. It would have been interesting to have a foreign coach all that time ago. It has become the fashion now, but it would have been ground-breaking then. Nobody in England had heard of him in 1984. It was “Sven-Goran Eriksson, who’s he?” When I bumped into him in England just after his appointment, I reminded him of the Tottenham thing, and his face lit up. If only, eh?’

Having missed out on Eriksson and Ferguson, who stayed at Aberdeen for another two years before joining Manchester United, Spurs gave the job to Burkinshaw’s number two, Peter Shreeves, and it was another three years before Terry Venables became the European-orientated coach Scholar wanted. In March 2002, in reflective mood, he said: ‘My first two choices weren’t bad ones, were they – Alex Ferguson and Sven-Goran Eriksson. I wanted Ferguson because, like Eriksson, he’d been successful in Europe. He’d won the Cup-Winners’ Cup and blazed a trail in Europe with Aberdeen.’

On 8 May 1984, three weeks before the European Cup Final, the president of Roma, Dino Viola, agreed with Eriksson that he would replace his fellow Swede, Nils Liedholm, as coach. He was not the first choice for the job, getting it only after Giovanni Trapattoni, then at Juventus, had spurned Viola’s overtures, but however the chance came, this really was the big time. Italy’s Serie A was undoubtedly the strongest, most glamorous league in the world at the time, and Roma had won the coveted scudetto in 1983. In 1983/84 they won the Italian Cup, beating Verona in the final, and were runners-up in Serie A, two points behind Juventus, as well as losing only on penalties to Liverpool in the European Cup. Eriksson, then, inherited a fine team, which had two world-class Brazilians, Falcao and Cerezo, at its fulcrum, with the ‘golden boy’ of Italian football, Bruno Conti, who had just made his international debut, wide on the right. Other significant individuals included the goalkeeper, Franco Tancredi, who had played twice for Italy, left-back Aldo Maldera, who had 10 caps, midfielders Carlo Ancelotti and Giuseppe Giannini, both of whom were to have substantial international careers, and strikers Maurizio Iorio, Roberto Pruzzo and Francesco Graziani. Iorio, 25, had been the leading scorer in Serie A the previous season, while on loan to Verona, and was naturally recalled, while Pruzzo, 29, had been the league’s top scorer in 1980, and had scored a brilliant equalizer against Liverpool in the European Cup Final. He had six caps. The most celebrated of the front men was Graziani, 32, whose 64 appearances for Italy took in the 1978 and 1982 World Cups. Despite the talent in the team, however, Eriksson’s first season was thoroughly disappointing. Defensively orientated to a tedious degree, Roma averaged less than a goal a game (33 in 34) in finishing a poor seventh in the league, and got no further than the last eight of the Cup-Winners’ Cup, where they were eliminated by Bayern Munich, for whom Lothar Matthaus was at his peerless best.

In mitigation, Eriksson’s entry into the Machiavellian world of Italian football was by no means straightforward. For a start, he was handicapped by the rule prohibiting foreigners from managing at club level (Liedholm had taken out dual citizenship to overcome this). Roma sought to get around it by naming a coach, Roberto Clagluna, as their official ‘trainer’, with Eriksson taking the title of director of football, but this use of a ‘stooge’ created more problems than it solved.

On taking over, Eriksson immediately asserted his authority by banning smoking, amending the bonus system to stop the players being rewarded for drawing games and ending ‘retiro’, the practice whereby the team ‘retired’ to weekend training camps. This latter decision, he now admits, was a mistake. He explained: ‘I tried to put an end to the custom of meeting at a hotel before our Sunday matches. When we finished training one Saturday, I told the players: “See you at lunch tomorrow.” This caused astonishment, and in the end I had to reinstate the meetings. Ritual and habit can provide security.’

In August, Roma won a pre-season tournament in Coruna, Spain, where top-class opposition was provided by Manchester United, Athletic Bilbao and Vasco da Gama, of Brazil, and the week before the Serie A programme started, they defeated Lazio 2–0 in the Italian Cup. After that it was a surprise, as well as a disappointment, when they were ominously slow out of the traps, with four successive draws in the league and a run of eight games without a win. A month into the season, the Italian Football Federation rejected the coaching association’s complaint against the employment of Eriksson, in defiance of the ban on foreign coaches, and scrapped the prohibition altogether. Freed of all impediments, real or imaginary, he was able to immerse himself in his work, and Roma picked up nicely after their first victory, 2–1 at home to Fiorentina. That was the launching pad for an unbeaten ten-match sequence, yet it was to be a stop-start sort of season, and after 11 games in Serie A their modest return of 12 points had them only in fifth place, six behind the surprise leaders, Verona. They had their moments, thumping Cremonese 5–0 away, Di Carlo getting a hat-trick, but generally flattered only to deceive. Fairly typical was the struggle they had to overcome little Wrexham in the second round of the Cup-Winners’ Cup in November. A single goal, scored by Francesco Graziani in the home leg, was enough to see off Steaua Bucharest in the first round, after which Welsh opposition, from the Football League’s Fourth Division, was expected to provide easy pickings. Roma won 2–0 at home in the first leg, with goals from Pruzzo and Cerezo, in a match notable for the return of Carlo Ancelotti, the powerful Italian international midfield player, who had been out injured for 11 months. The aggregate margin, 3–0, was comfortable enough, but The Times reported the decisive second leg as follows: ‘Only disgraceful refereeing in the first leg, and a rush of blood to the head at the wrong moment in the second stood between Wrexham and an extraordinary overall victory. Cushioned as they were by two highly debatable goals in the first leg, it would be easy to say that Roma, runners-up in the European Cup only six months ago, did just enough to dispose of England’s [sic] 89th best team. But the truth is that they might easily have trooped from the field here a beaten team, had it not been for some hasty finishing and the magnificence of Falcao, the Brazilian, who covered an amazing amount of ground for someone supposedly unfit.’

Falcao had joined Roma from the Brazilian club Internacional for £950,000 in 1980, and was widely acclaimed as the best midfield player at the 1982 World Cup. Twice Brazil’s Footballer of the Year, he came third in the World Footballer of the Year poll, behind Paolo Rossi and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, in 1982. Extravagantly gifted and immensely experienced, the 30 year old was expected to be the cornerstone of Eriksson’s team, but he injured his knee in a goalless draw with Verona on 21 October and then the president, Viola, complained bitterly about his failure to play against Juventus in Turin the following week. Falcao was carrying two stitches in his knee, but Viola felt he was fit enough to play, and a war of words ensued. Viola said that Cerezo, not Falcao, was Roma’s key player, Falcao took umbrage and Eriksson was caught in the middle, very much the loser. Falcao suffered more knee trouble in a 0–0 stalemate, against Lazio, on 11 November, and the Brazilian’s continuing fitness problems undermined the team that season. A superstar, on a two-year contract worth £1.5m, and a living legend among the club’s supporters after his colossal contribution to the 1983 title win, he dated Ursula Andress while still living with his mum in a sumptuous villa in the fashionable Monte Mario part of the city, and was ferried to and from training (and everywhere else) in a chauffeur-driven BMW. Unfortunately for all concerned, he spent most of the 1984/85 season on various treatment tables, eventually undergoing surgery on his troublesome knee in the United States before a lengthy convalescence at home in Brazil.

His last game for Roma was away to Maradona’s Napoli on 16 December 1984. Typically, he marked his farewell with a goal, but after celebrating with his usual jump, he returned to earth awkwardly, and the smile froze on his lips. Five days later, he was on the operating table for more surgery on his knee. The whole team had been dependent upon Falcao to an unhealthy degree, Eriksson felt. ‘Due to his knee problem, he had only four matches with us during my time at the club, but in the games he played, Roma were a completely different team. He went around the pitch pointing and co-ordinating. When he wasn’t able to play, the others would come to me and say: “We can’t play without Falcao.” That season we came seventh in the league. The following year, with just about the same team, we came second and won the cup. But it took me a whole year to get the players to understand that we could play without Falcao. Without him, the players had a mental block. Falcao’s presence, or absence, was decisive in determining how the players felt, and this in turn determined how well they played.’

Searching for a contemporary comparison, Eriksson told me: ‘If he was playing today, Falcao would be another Patrick Vieira.’ When Falcao was unavailable, the Roma midfield was staffed by Cerezo, Ancelotti, Conti and Giannini, an elegant stalwart who was to make 318 appearances for the club between 1981 and 1996. For goals, Roma relied largely upon Pruzzo, the most prolific striker in the club’s history, who weighed in with a modest eight in 21 league games. That Giannini, with four, was the second-highest scorer says it all about Roma’s football that season. Graziani, a World Cup-winning striker with Italy two years earlier, managed only two in 19 matches.

By January they were moving up the table, after successive 1–0 wins against Torino and Avellino, but the crowd, and the critics, were not happy. The newspapers complained that Roma were playing in an unsophisticated ‘English’ style. Quite right too, after their defeat by Liverpool, countered Viola. He’d had enough of Liedholm’s ‘lateral football’.

The cup competitions provided little by way of relief. After knocking out Genoa 3–0 and Lazio 2–0, Roma came unstuck in the quarter-finals of the Italian Cup, where they lost on the away-goal rule to Parma, who were then near the bottom of Serie B. In the Cup-Winners’ Cup, they reached the last eight, where they came up against Bayern Munich. It was billed as the tie of the round, but the first leg, in Bavaria on 6 March, was something of a damp squib. Bayern were without Michael Rummenigge, who was ill, and rushed Soren Lerby back to bolster their midfield when he was still suffering from the after-effects of ’flu, but they were still too strong for Roma, running out comfortable 2–0 winners. Reinhold Mathy missed two easy chances, Matthaus fired over when unmarked and Dieter Hoeness headed negligently the wrong side of a post before skipper Klaus Augenthaler finally gave Bayern the lead, just before half-time, with a rasping shot from distance. Pruzzo might have equalized after 72 minutes. Instead, Hoeness got the Germans’ second five minutes later, and Roma had it all to do in the return.

By the time it came around, on 20 March, Eriksson’s team were a disappointing seventh in the league, with 23 points from 20 games. Effectively, the tie was all over by the 33rd minute, when Tancredi fouled Mathy to enable Matthaus to make it 3–0 on aggregate from the penalty spot. Sebastiano Nela pulled one back after 80 minutes, but it was much too late, and anyway Bayern scored again within a minute, to win 2–1 on the night and 4–1 overall.

Finishing seventh in the league was nowhere near good enough for a club who had been runners-up and European Cup Finalists the previous year, and Eriksson needed something much better for the 1985/86 season if he was to keep his job. Poland’s Zbigniew Boniek, from Juventus, was chosen to replace Falcao, who made his last appearance in a friendly against Ajax in May, then went home to Brazil. He was still under contract to Roma, but when he was summoned back to Rome for medical checks, he ignored the call, with the result that Viola applied to the Italian federation for permission to cancel his contract and, to considerable surprise, won the case. ‘He’d had a couple of very bad injuries, and was never the same afterwards,’ Eriksson explained. Furious, Falcao entered into abortive negotiations with Fiorentina, before joining Sao Paulo. Five major corporations raised the money the Brazilian club needed, which was £1m for one season. Some £600,000 of this went to Roma, with Falcao pocketing the rest.

Red tape meant it was 10 August before Roma’s lawyers succeeded in getting his contract declared null and void, and at one stage, because of the limitation on foreign players, it seemed that they would have to ‘park’ Cerezo on loan somewhere to make room in the team for Boniek. ‘Zibi’, as he was known, had first come to the fore as a 22 year old, when he was one of the stars of the 1978 World Cup, in Argentina. Four years later, in Spain, he scored a hat-trick against Belgium, playing as a striker, and his all-round excellence was such that he finished his career in Serie A playing as a sweeper. When he arrived from Turin, it was said that he was Viola’s choice, not Eriksson’s, but the coach will not have that. He told me: ‘It was a decision made jointly between us. Nobody was ever signed by a club president without my complete agreement.’ Nevertheless, Eriksson had more arguments with Boniek than any other player, and was soon admonishing him for his passion for gambling (he bought a racehorse), suggesting he concentrate on his other off-the-field interests, chess and bridge. He was, however, a player worth indulging. ‘He was a different type to Falcao, not so authoritative, but top-class technically,’ Eriksson says. With Boniek at the hub of the team, Roma’s improvement was startling. Such was Eriksson’s success in convincing his players that they could win without Falcao that they challenged for the championship all season and won the Italian Cup. They started as they meant to go on, with successive victories away to Atalanta, 2–1, and at home to Udinese, 1–0. Pruzzo was quickly off the mark, scoring Roma’s first goal of the season. Revelling in the improved lines of supply engineered by Boniek, the young striker rattled in 19 goals in 24 appearances, including all five in the 5–1 trouncing of Avellino. ‘Pruzzo was extraordinary in the penalty area,’ Boniek told me. ‘He was a very good header of the ball, and lethal in front of goal. He scored so often because he was a natural finisher.’ Boniek himself weighed in with seven in 29 games, five of them coming in a midseason purple patch which brought five in five, and with Graziani also contributing five (in 14 matches), the team’s total was up from 33 to 51.

After the first 11 games, Roma were only sixth in the table, six points behind the leaders, Juventus, but after 21 they had closed the gap to just three points, and lay second. They had won more matches – 14 to Juve’s 13 – and had scored more goals (34 to their rivals’ 31). Then, with six rounds of the championship left, Roma beat Juventus 3–0, with goals from Graziani, Pruzzo and Cerezo signalling the start of a charge.

From being 12 points behind Juve at one stage, they came within touching distance of the scudetto. Going into the penultimate round of fixtures there was just one point between Juve, who were playing Milan, and Roma, who were at home to Lecce. The momentum was with Eriksson’s team, who were widely regarded as favourites for the title, when disaster struck. Roma, unaccountably, lost 3–2 to Lecce, who were bottom of the table and already condemned to relegation, thereby blowing their title chances. Everything seemed to be going to plan when Graziani scored after only seven minutes, but then Di Chiara equalized and a Berbas penalty gave Lecce the lead. Eight minutes into the second half, Berbas scored again, and Juve were home and dry. A goal from Pruzzo, after 82 minutes, was no sort of consolation. ‘Still today I think about that match with a lot of anger,’ Boniek says. ‘That defeat against Lecce put an end to our dreams. It was a game we had to win and should have won. It can happen sometimes, that the top team loses to the bottom, but I still find that result hard to accept.’

Giannini, offering an interesting insight into the Italian footballer’s mentality, says: ‘We arrived at that game exhausted, and at the interval we made another mistake. We thought we could make a meal of Lecce, without ever trying to get them on to our side. It is probably not completely ethical what I say, but perhaps it would have been better to try to reason with our opponents, asking them openly not to overdo their efforts.’

Looking back, Eriksson says: ‘If I could do it all over again, I would take the team away from Rome – away from the interference of club directors, the president, then fans and the media. Then, perhaps, things might have gone differently.’