Читать книгу Sven-Goran Eriksson - Joe Lovejoy - Страница 4

‘My advice to Sven is to quit his job, too. Those bastards at the FA want to destroy him. The knives are out.’

FARIA ALAM, after resigning as personal assistant

to the Football Association’s executive

director, David Davies, August 2004

It was all a far cry from the heady days of November 2000, when Sven-Goran Eriksson was warmly greeted as England’s saviour on taking up the management at a time when Kevin Keegan’s abrupt departure had left the national team rock bottom, not just in their World Cup qualifying group, but mentally as well. Now, nearly four years on, the FA wanted him out, and were happy for it to be known that the best paid coach in the world was on borrowed time. If his employers were dissatisfied with Eriksson, the feeling was certainly mutual. He had been ‘hung out to dry’, as he put it, over the ‘Fariagate’ sex scandal that had threatened to bring down the hierarchy of English football’s governing body, and briefly considered sueing for constructive dismissal before opting to soldier on until the next attractive job offer came along.

How had it come to this? It is a story that makes ‘Footballers’ Wives’ look tame, a tale of unbridled lust, greed, intrigue and xenophobia, laced with a lot of football – some good, some bad. When all is said and done, the final verdict has to be that England’s first foreign coach proved to be an expensive disappointment. He deserves credit for reviving the dispirited and disorganized team he inherited from Keegan, but having raised morale, performance and public expectation, he achieved no more than quarter-final places at the 2002 World Cup and 2004 European Championship when, with a more adventurous approach, England might have done much better.

In football terms, history will judge Eriksson to have been too defensively orientated, too inflexible in his team selection and tactics, and too indulgent of his players. In the big matches, England paid the ultimate price for timidly circling the wagons and defending slender leads instead of trying to improve them; they had no Plan B when bog standard 4–4–2 went awry; and, even for those patently out of form, it seemed harder to get out of the team than it was to get in it in the first place. This was most glaringly apparent in the case of David Beckham who, on his own admission, was not as fit as he should have been at Euro 2004, yet was invariably allowed to play the full 90 minutes, or even extra-time, when he should have been substituted.

One of England’s most experienced defenders propounds an interesting theory here. Remarking on a quote from Nancy Dell’Olio, Eriksson’s former partner, who told a TV chat show that he disliked one-on-one conflict, the player suggested this was evident both in the coach’s personal and professional lives. The coach had remained with Ms Dell’Olio for at least a year after the relationship had run its course because breaking up would have been too confrontational, and he was reluctant to substitute senior players for the same reason.

Be that as it may, Eriksson often seemed to be in his captain’s thrall – so much so that when the squad went to Sardinia in May 2004, for pre-tournament preparations, the coach and Nancy moved out of the best suite at the Forte Village, which they had been routinely allocated by the hotel management, to allow Beckham and his wife, Victoria, to move in. This sent out all the wrong signals, fuelling resentment within the squad of the special treatment, and unprecedented influence Beckham enjoyed.

Eriksson has always asked to be judged on results alone, in which case he was clearly overpaid on £4 million a year compared to the £1.1 million earned by Luis Felipe Scolari, who won the 2002 World Cup with Brazil and took Portugal to the final of Euro 2004. Given that disparity, it is unrealistic for the England coach to expect the media to focus entirely on football matters and ignore his private life. The intrusion Eriksson often complains about comes with the pay packet. As the Sunday Times put it, if he wants to be free to romance whoever and behave however he chooses, without it getting into the papers, let him go and manage Austria or Switzerland for £250,000 a year.

Initially, there was no shortage of sympathy when the stormy nature of Eriksson’s relationship with Ms Dell’Olio was made public, but gradually it dawned on people that for a man who craved anonymity he chose some strange partners, and strange venues at which to parade them. Not many women seek publicity as avidly as Ulrika Jonsson, and it surprised nobody but poor old Sven when she made a small fortune out of her kiss-and-tell tittle-tattle about their affair. Similarly, if you want to stay out of the newspapers, the celebrity haunt that is London’s San Lorenzo restaurant is hardly the best place to do your courting.

It was a close run thing at the time, but Eriksson got away with the Ulrika business. It was when others followed that public sympathy swung away from him, towards the much-put-upon Nancy, his live-in partner, who continually declared her love for him, and behaved accordingly, only to be repeatedly reduced to tears and tantrums by his serial unfaithfulness before they finally broke up, towards the end of July 2004.

Eriksson seems to enjoy risky, and risque, behaviour, and thought nothing of entering into a liaison dangereux with Faria Alam, a 38-year-old ex-model of Bangladeshi extraction who was employed on secretarial duties by his friend and most supportive ally at the FA, David Davies. Ms Alam had already had an affair with the FA’s chief executive, Mark Palios, and when the newspapers got wind of what was going on, the inevitable furore became known as ‘Fariagate’.

Eriksson’s stock was already at an all-time low after England’s disappointing performance at Euro 2004, and at first it seemed he was behaving wisely straight after their elimination, when he retreated to his native Sweden and kept his head down. In fact he was seeking solace in the ample charms of his latest conquest, who had joined him at his palatial villa in Sunne, not far from his parent’s home. He had been seeing Ms Alam since January, and telephoned her every day during the championship in Portugal. Now they had another of their clandestine trysts, but this time the secret was out. The News of the World were on to them, and what followed was, according to one senior FA source, ‘… a glaring, startling nightmare that caused everybody to lose faith in the whole organization.’

The crisis was provoked not so much by the affair as by Eriksson’s ambivalent reply when questioned about it by Davies – that and the fact that Palios had also been involved with Ms Alam. Eriksson told Davies in a telephone conversation deemed by the coach to be personal and private that it was all ‘nonsense’. He was therefore both surprised and incensed when this brief chat with a friend led to a formal, public denial by the FA, which subsequently had to be retracted, causing great embarrassment to all concerned. The key word ‘nonsense’ had referred to the fact that Eriksson’s love life was under scrutiny again; it was not a ‘categorical denial’ that the relationship had taken place.

It was when Palios was implicated as another of Ms Alam’s lovers that an awkward situation became a full-blown scandal. The FA’s chief executive had been a man on a mission, the mission being ‘to clean up the game’, and News of the World exposés of his own behaviour would not do at all. Through his head of communications, Colin Gibson, he offered the paper a deal. They would be given full details of Eriksson’s affair, the quid pro quo being that they left Palios’ name out of the story. For a few days Palios and Gibson thought they had pulled it off, but then the News of the World decided that the attempted cover-up was the best story of all, and printed a transcript of their taped telephone conversations with Gibson, during which he said: ‘What I’m proposing is that I give you chapter and verse on her and Sven. And that the pay-off, obviously, is that we leave MP [Palios] out of it. I’ve got the details, I’ve got the places, I’ve got the phone calls. I’ve got everything.’

When news of their machinations came out, Palios and Gibson were both forced to resign, and for a time it seemed that Eriksson would have to follow suit. The chairman of the FA, Geoff Thompson, instigated an investigation into the ‘coach’s conduct, hiring an independent lawyer to interview all those involved and prepare a report to be considered by an emergency meeting of the FA’s twelve-man board. The feeling was that Eriksson could be sacked, without the £10 million or so compensation entailed in paying up his contract, if he was found to have committed ‘gross misconduct’ by misleading his bosses when he told Davies the original News of the World story was ‘nonsense’.

There was a great deal of off-the-record briefing and ‘spinning’ against Eriksson by members of the board, reflected in an article in the Daily Express on 31 July, when Harry Harris wrote: ‘Sven-Goran Eriksson will be sacked next week. The FA board is split 11–1, overwhelmingly in favour of ending his reign as England coach.’ Steve McClaren, of Middlesbrough, was to take over.

Two days later, on returning from holiday in Spain, Davies misjudged his employer’s mood, and gave Eriksson a handsome testimonial which effectively put him, too, on trial. The executive director said: ‘Sven is very popular and respected by the players. He has a consistent track record everywhere he has worked. He is one of the outstanding coaches in the world, that is why many clubs seek his services.’ The board were furious. Unwittingly, Davies had guaranteed his friend a handsome pay-off in the event of his dismissal. One board member, wearing a cloak of anonymity, thundered: ‘Davies had no business making those statements. It was taken as a vote of confidence in Eriksson when Davies is in no position to do it. It is for the board to decide whether Eriksson goes or not. Davies should have been told to keep his mouth shut.’

It was against this bloodthirsty background that the board met on 5 August. By this stage, the FA were so paranoid about leaks and adverse publicity that they booked three suites at different hotels and didn’t tell members where they were going until they were on their way. The real venue was the Leonard Hotel in Marylebone, where there was one absentee, Mike Rawding, from the East Riding FA, who was in hospital.

Blood on the walls? Hardly. After so much hype and hullabaloo, the meeting was the soggiest of damp squibs. The independent lawyer, Peter Norbury, had found no evidence that Eriksson had deliberately misled the FA over his affair with Ms Alam, concluding that the key conversation between Davies and the coach has been a personal one, and was therefore inadmissible. The meeting therefore broke up without a vote being taken on Eriksson’s position, and it was announced that he had ‘no case to answer’. There was criticism of Davies, for failing to phrase his question more precisely, and on a formal basis, and also for his fulsome praise of the subject of the inquiry in advance of its outcome, but a slap on the wrist and a reminder to restrict his comments to his area of jurisdiction was deemed sufficient action.

What did Eriksson make of it all? He laughed dismissively over dinner with his assistant, Tord Grip, but would have been far from amused had he heard what was said before the meeting, when there was broad support for one of his most trenchant critics who declaimed: ‘It’s time we were looking for a new coach as well as a chief executive. We need honourable, straightforward leadership.’

On a strictly non-attributable basis, senior football correspondents were told that Eriksson would be on trial in England’s first two World Cup qualifying games, away to Austria and Poland in September. Failure to win either of these would provide an excuse to sack him for footballing reasons. Ms Alam, who had been privy to the FA’s thought processes from ‘pillow talk’ when Palios was her lover, said they thought Eriksson was ‘more trouble than he was worth’. They believed his ‘sexual shenanigans detracted from his job’. Her advice was to get out before they got him.

Predictably, the England team leapt to the support of their beleaguered coach, but history tells us that players are motivated mostly by self-interest, and always rush to speak up for the man who picks them. They backed Bobby Robson, Terry Venables and, to a lesser extent, Kevin Keegan until they left, when it quickly became a case of: ‘The king is dead, long live the king.’ Claudio Ranieri, at Chelsea, was another good example.

The reserves, who rarely get a game, even when Beckham and company are playing poorly, are nowhere near as supportive, and one former England captain, who played throughout Euro 2004, told me, on the understanding that he was not identified: ‘We could qualify for tournaments with my dad as manager. Sven is paid all that money to win the big games – Brazil, France and Portugal – not the qualifiers, and the fact is we haven’t done that.’

Elsewhere in this book there is glowing testimony to Eriksson’s ability and success at club level. Unfortunately for England, in two major tournaments he has failed to live up to his reputation in the very different world of international management, and he seems unlikely to have another chance. The mystique that served him well in the early stages of his management has been stripped away by the passage of time and, in the places that matter, increasing familiarity was bringing with it something dangerously close to contempt.