Читать книгу Sven-Goran Eriksson - Joe Lovejoy - Страница 7

In hindsight it is clear that Kevin Keegan should have gone straight after Euro 2000, when the ‘Three Lions’ returned from the Low Countries with their tails lodged firmly between their legs. Tactical naïvety has become a clichéd criticism, trotted out ad nauseam on every radio phone-in, but Keegan was its personification. Against Portugal in Eindhoven, with England leading 2–0, he opted not to shut up shop and man-mark Luis Figo, arguably the best player in the world, with the result that England let slip what should have been a winning position and lost 3–2. Their hopes were resurrected with a 1–0 victory over the worst German team in living memory, but then a deserved 3–2 defeat against Romania, in Charleroi, where some of his choices were exposed as inadequate at international level, brought Keegan and company home before the competition proper had started.

After Glenn Hoddle had psycho-babbled himself out of the job, Keegan was portrayed as ‘the people’s choice’ by the Football Association. He wasn’t. That the label stuck was something of a triumph for the spin doctors at the FA, for in the opinion polls it was not Keegan but Terry Venables who had emerged as the clear favourite, both with the fans and with the professionals in the game. In the aftermath of Euro 2000, it was apparent that ‘King Kevin’ had feet of clay. The players liked him, but despaired at his lack of tactical nous, the public could see through his crass, British bulldog tub-thumping, and his employers were beginning to have their doubts.

The change should, and probably would, have been made before the start of the World Cup qualifying campaign, but for the absence of a suitable candidate who was available and, crucially, on whom the FA mandarins could agree. Venables, who had proved his worth in taking England to the semi-finals of Euro 96, would have had a second crack at the job but for the intransigence of Noel White, the influential chairman of the FA’s international committee. So Keegan was allowed to continue – a decision the FA was to rue.

By one of the quirks of fate that abound in football, the first game in World Cup qualifying saw England at home to Germany, the old enemy providing the opposition for the last international to be played under Wembley’s twin towers. The game would be followed by a second qualifier, away to Finland, four days later. Traditionally, the Germans were something of a bête noire, but there were no Beckenbauers, Netzers or Mullers in their millennium class, and England, who had just beaten them 1–0 in Euro 2000, should have had nothing to fear.

But that was reckoning without Keegan’s selectorial waywardness. For some unfathomable reason, he played Gareth Southgate, a central defender, in midfield, where this most willing and diligent of professionals was a four-square peg in a circular hole. England were depressingly poor, but Germany were not much better, and the only goal of a low-quality game was more the product of defensive deficiency than Teutonic inspiration. There should have been no more than token danger when Liverpool’s Dietmar Hamann stepped up to take a free-kick fully 30 yards out, but England neglected to form the customary defensive wall, with the result that Hamann was able to beat David Seaman’s slow-mo dive, low to his right.

England were booed off the pitch and Keegan was verbally abused by his erstwhile admirers as he made the long, disconsolate trudge around the perimeter, during which the extent of his inadequacy finally hit home. By the time he reached the sanctuary of the dressing room, he had made a fateful decision. It was time to quit. Disarmingly honest, he told the players and his employers, and then the nation, via television, that he was not good enough for the job. Somebody else should have a go.

In the dressing room, there was emotion and confusion in equal measure. Some of the senior players, such as Tony Adams and Graeme Le Saux, urged the manager to ‘sleep on it’ before finally making up his mind, but he was adamant. Adam Crozier, the FA’s Chief Executive at the time, and did most to try to persuade Keegan to reconsider. Recalling one of his worst days in the job, he told me: ‘Losing to Germany was an incredibly disappointing way to start the World Cup qualifying series. It set us right back on our heels. To lose your first game at home to your main rivals would be a major setback for anybody, but it was the way we lost it. The way we played that afternoon, we seemed to have gone backwards again.

‘From my conversations with him, I know Kevin could see that there were good young players coming through, who were going to improve the team over the next couple of years, and he wasn’t sure that he was the right man to get the best out of them. Kevin is a great patriot, and he had always had a great rapport with the fans. Not everybody will agree with this, but I felt it was a very brave thing for him to say: “I don’t think I’m up to the job.” The thing I didn’t agree with him over, and I told him so, was his timing. My view was that if that was the way he felt, the time to go was after the game against Finland, four days later. Quitting after Germany left us completely rudderless for the trip to Helsinki. Another false start in the second game, which was what we had, was always going to make the task of qualifying even more difficult for whoever took over permanently. So I felt Kevin should have stayed on for that one, and I certainly tried very hard to persuade him, as did a number of the players and Noel White, Chairman of the International Committee.

‘In the dressing room straight after the game we all tried – Tony Adams particularly – to get him to reconsider. Don’t forget, he was very popular with the players, and even after that game there was still a lot of love for Kevin and a great deal of support. They wanted him to stay, but there was no persuading him. Anybody who knows Kevin will tell you that one of his characteristics is that once he has made up his mind about something, that’s it. He won’t budge.

‘Crucial to his decision, I think, was the reaction of the fans as he came away from the pitch. He had always had that fantastic relationship with them; now they were booing and insulting him. In the dressing room, his mindset was complete. He wasn’t emotional, not at all. People imagine that he was, but he wasn’t. He came to a very clear-headed decision, and I think he made it with the best of intentions. He felt it was the right thing for his country. Even for the game on the Wednesday, his point of view was that the team would do better under someone else. He said to me: “I don’t think I can lift them [the players] because I don’t feel up there myself.”’

For Crozier and White, the urgent task that chaotic Saturday night was to find a stand-in to take the squad to Helsinki, less than 48 hours later. Crozier explained: ‘It wasn’t just that we’d lost, or that it was the last game at Wembley, but the England coach had resigned, so there was a huge furore about what had happened and where we went from here. In terms of the Wednesday match, there was only one sensible solution, and that was to get our technical director, Howard Wilkinson, to do it. Given the timescale [the England squad flew out to Helsinki on the Monday morning], it had to be somebody from within, and Howard had the knowledge, both of our players and of international football. So on the Saturday night, by about 7.30pm, we’d agreed that he would be in charge for Finland. I spoke to Noel White about it, and checked with the FA chairman [Geoff Thompson] to make sure that he was comfortable with it. But in the final analysis, our options were so limited that it had to be Howard. To have put someone in from scratch would have been asking the impossible.’

One of the more fanciful tabloid newspapers reported that Crozier had left the dressing room and telephoned Eriksson’s agent, Athole Still, to enquire about his availability. (An interesting, cosmopolitan character, who trained as an opera singer in Italy and worked as a swimming coach, TV commentator and journalist, Still got to know Eriksson in the mid-1980s when they met during abortive negotiations to take Still’s first football client, John Barnes, from Watford to Roma, who were then coached by Eriksson. A friendship was forged over the next few years and, when Eriksson’s first agent, the Swede Borg Lanz, died in 1993, Still replaced him.) ‘That was rubbish,’ Crozier said, laughing. What did happen was that before England left for Finland, Crozier formed a sub-committee whose brief was to draw up a list of candidates. As is his wont, he wanted to be seen to be proactive. The new manager would be his man.

The assumption was always that Wilkinson was a non-runner. As a manager of the old school, at Leeds, he had been good enough to win the last First Division title before the advent of the Premier League, and in those days he had confided that his driving ambition was to manage England. He had done it once before in a caretaker’s capacity, after Hoddle’s abrupt departure, but a comprehensive 2–0 defeat by France at Wembley did nothing for his credentials, and England’s goalless bore with Finland on 11 October 2000 merely confirmed the impression that the game had moved on and passed him by. The occasion was more remarkable for what happened before, and afterwards, than for anything that happened in the 90 minutes. The final training session before the match was witnessed by a group of English football correspondents and by two members of the FA’s international committee, all of whom were distinctly unimpressed. The journalists noticed that England’s game plan seemed to revolve around hitting long balls, right to left, for Emile Heskey to knock down. The FA kingmakers noted that Wilkinson’s man-management methods left as much to be desired as his tactics. Watching him bark out orders via a microphone headset, one said to the other: ‘We’ve no chance of winning here, he’s lecturing international footballers like schoolboys.’ As if to reinforce the point, two of the senior professionals present, Stuart Pearce and Teddy Sheringham, exchanged horrified looks behind Wilkinson’s back.

The poverty of England’s performance in the Olympic stadium, and a table which showed them bottom, with one point and Germany top with six, moved one reporter to enquire whether it might be better to forget about qualifying for Japan and Korea, and use the remaining matches to bring on younger players with Euro 2004 and the 2006 World Cup in mind. Instead of the expected ‘each game is there to be won’ response, Wilkinson replied: ‘The possibility you’ve raised obviously has to be considered. In the interests of the long term, we could go into it [the rest of the qualifying series] picking a team that’s going to be there in four years’ time.’

But would the public stand for the jam tomorrow approach? ‘If it’s the right thing to do in the opinion of the professionals, they’ve got to. What’s the alternative? To keep doing what we’re doing at the moment, riding the rollercoaster? Quite frankly, I’m fed up with that. I don’t even enjoy the highs particularly, because every time we’re up there I think: “Here we go again, hold on to the bar because we’ll be going down any moment.” No, the real alternative is to go in with realistic expectations and to outline clearly to the players what is expected of them. We’ve got to make sure that their expectations are realistic, and that they don’t fall into the trap of trying to achieve what you lot [the media] set out in your agenda.’

Any slender chance Wilkinson might have had of getting the job on a permanent basis disappeared in this puff of pomposity. Abandon the World Cup, and a lucrative ride on the gravy train? This was heresy at the FA. Crozier says: ‘I’m not sure Howard wanted it, and the general feeling among the sub-committee was that he was never going to get it.’ There is conflicting testimony as to what happened next. Crozier would have it that he was immediately intent upon crossing the Channel, and the Rubicon, by appointing from abroad. Always the mover and shaker, he made all the running. ‘In the period between the games against Germany and Finland, I compiled what I thought was the right short list. Then I got the sub-committee together, and spoke to them about why I’d done what I had, and said: “These are the people who should be in the frame. For a job of such magnitude, I thought there were only five who could rise to the challenge.”’

Apart from Crozier, the head-hunting subcommittee comprised: Geoff Thompson (the FA chairman), Noel White (chairman of the international committee), David Richards (vice-chairman of the international committee and chairman of the Premier League), David Dein of Arsenal and Peter Ridsdale of Leeds United (both of whom represented the Premier League on the FA board) and Wilkinson (FA technical director). It was to these men, Crozier says, that he took his five potential candidates. He told me: ‘We talked a lot about the criteria for the job, and the most important one for me, right at the very top of the list, was a sustained record of success. At the time I said success internationally, which was misunderstood. I didn’t mean a record of success in international football, but success wherever the person had coached, across the world. Our man had to be successful, not just as a one-season wonder, but somebody who had really achieved, wherever he had been. We wanted it all – international credibility, tactical nous, man-management expertise and the ability to handle the media. We were looking for respect within the game and the right personality and cultural profile for international football, where the highs are incredibly high, the lows really low, and there’s a lot of time between games to fret over a bad result or get over-excited by a good one. We needed somebody who could cope with both extremes in a very levelheaded way. An emotional person over-reacts, and it becomes a rollercoaster existence. A calm personality is essential for international management.

‘I started with a long list, then broke it down and said to the committee: “There is a maximum of five who could meet our criteria and do the job.” At first I had people on the list who seemed to be good candidates, but then we thought: “Hang on, have they genuinely got all this?” The truth was that not many had.’ While others scratched their heads and dithered, Crozier drove the process forward. ‘I said: “Right, this is the short list. Before we go any further, does anyone disagree? No? Right, leave it with me, I will go away and look at this lot and find out everything I need to know about them.”’

Ridsdale remembers the sequence of events rather differently. According to him, he proposed Bobby Robson, who became the sub-committee’s first choice, ahead of Eriksson. The former Leeds chairman told me: ‘After the Germany game, on the Monday, Adam asked me, and the others, if we would form the sub-committee. We flew out to Finland and all the members of the sub-committee were there, apart from David Dein, and we thought it was a good opportunity to have our first meeting. We got together in the team’s hotel, and Adam produced a flip chart with a clean sheet of paper – nobody’s name was on it. He divided the board into four sections: English managers, non-English managers working in England, foreign managers and I think the fourth category was up and coming. On the English side, we had Bobby Robson, Terry Venables, Roy Hodgson and Howard Wilkinson, with a question mark against him. Of those working in England but non-English, we had Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and Gerard Houllier, the foreigners were Eriksson, Johann Cruyff, Marcello Lippi and Hector Cuper, and in the up-and-coming category were Martin O’Neill, David O’Leary, Peter Taylor and Bryan Robson. These names were solicited by Adam and written on the board by him. He said: “These are the categories, do we agree? Can anyone think of anybody else? No? Right.” So we went through the names, and everybody agreed that the ideal was an Englishman with another young Englishman backing him up. We had Bobby Robson and Peter Taylor as manager and heir apparent. There was a long debate about whether Terry [Venables] should be considered, and everybody agreed that if “New England” was to represent what the FA wanted it to stand for, we couldn’t discount Terry’s non-footballing reputation, whatever its rights and wrongs. The view was that, given what we were trying to achieve at the FA, we had to have a new beginning, and therefore Terry was not appropriate. That was unanimous. Whether it was fair to him or not, the baggage that came with him counted against him, and he was out of it.

‘Having debated all the rights and wrongs, we came out of it with two names: Bobby Robson and Sven. The agreement was that Adam would go away and seek permission from Newcastle to talk to Robson, to see if he was an option. We weren’t just talking about having him for one or two games, as was widely reported at the time, we wanted him on a permanent basis. There was, though, a suggestion that if Bobby would only agree to do it for the rest of the season, that would buy us time.’

Ridsdale, now Chairman at Barnsley, adds that Crozier was told: ‘If you go to Newcastle and get permission to speak to him, and Bobby says: “I’m not interested, but I’m prepared to help you out as a stopgap,” that would be better than nothing. Adam was sent away from the meeting with two alternatives to explore: Bobby Robson with a young English coach, or if not, Sven. After that first meeting, Bobby was in front of Sven. Everybody’s perception was: “Ideally, we appoint an Englishman. If not, we’ll go overseas.” Bobby only ceased to be the front runner when Newcastle were approached and said they wouldn’t release him.’

Crozier denies much of this and, in fairness, it is his version of events that ties in with that of Noel White. During the course of his research, Crozier said, he relied heavily on the advice of Sir Alex Ferguson, who had ruled himself out of the running for the job, but was willing to assist the FA in their quest.

‘I spent a lot of time with Alex, who was tremendously helpful. The night Manchester United played PSV Eindhoven in the Champions’ League (18 October 2000, seven days after the Finland game) he gave me a couple of hours at Old Trafford. When I went to see him I actually had a dual purpose, although nobody knew it at the time. I went to pick Alex’s brain about getting the right manager, but also to get his agreement to let us have Steve McClaren, his assistant, as part of our new coaching team. I wanted continuity, a long-term strategy, and I’d got the sub-committee to agree that we’d have three or four coaches under the manager, none of whom would be “The Chosen One”, as Bryan Robson was under Terry Venables, but any one of whom might emerge as the heir apparent over a period of time. For me, you see, there were two searches going on at the same time. Everyone thought I was looking for an England manager, but I was looking for a manager and his back-up. As it turned out, I ended up getting the support team first: Steve from United and Peter Taylor from Leicester, plus Sammy Lee, from Liverpool, for the Under-21s.’

When it came to the top job, Ferguson helped to point Crozier in Eriksson’s direction. ‘Having found out as much as I could about potential targets, and having listened to what expert witnesses like Alex had to say, I became absolutely convinced that Sven was our man after that first week. Alex was very helpful. We also talked about his players’ feelings about the England set-up. When they went back to Manchester United after international duty with us, what were they saying about us? From what they had told him, and from what he had seen, what did Alex think about our way of doing things? Where were we going wrong? That helped us to identify the sort of person we needed to fix it.’

Where Crozier and Ridsdale agree is that after the first week, Eriksson topped the wanted list. Crozier says the peripatetic Hodgson (ex-Malmo, Switzerland, Grasshoppers, Internazionale, Blackburn, Udinese etc) fell at the first hurdle, failing the ‘sustained success’ test, and Ferguson and Houllier were discounted on grounds of unavailability. So, too, was Wenger. Arsenal were naturally keen to keep the manager who led them to the Double in 1998, and the presence of Dein, their vice-chairman, on the sub-committee inevitably led to suggestions of a conflict of interests. The smooth poise for which Dein is renowned was disturbed momentarily when Wenger went on Sky TV and said he could not understand why England had not asked about him.

Before cottoning on to Eriksson, the media had made the Arsenal man the favourite for the job. So was he considered or not? Dein havered, saying: ‘He [Wenger] had gone public many, many times with the fact that he was going to respect his contract with Arsenal, and this was all about the art of the possible. Who could we get? There was no point wasting our energies on somebody we couldn’t get.’

When the sub-committee met for the second and last time, Eriksson was ‘a clear front runner’, Crozier says. The fans’ favourite, Venables, had disappeared off the radar. ‘If you measure his record against all our criteria, he didn’t stack up as well as Sven. It’s a subjective thing, and I’m sure there are people who still disagree, but if you are a leader, you have to back your judgement. The only time I got upset during the whole process was when some journalist friends of Terry’s wrote that we’d chosen integrity as one of our criteria specifically to rule him out, as if he didn’t have any. I found that upsetting for him because: (a) I wouldn’t want a friend to write that about me, and (b) it wasn’t true, so it was very unfair. We were looking for a broad spectrum of qualities, and my hunch was that Sven had them all – or at least more so than anybody else we were considering.’

Eriksson had been Crozier’s choice from day one. ‘That wasn’t the case with everyone on the sub-committee,’ he acknowledged. ‘Peter [Ridsdale] was always for Bobby, and initially other people had other views. At our first meeting some said we should go for Alex Ferguson, others Arsene Wenger, and there was a lot of discussion about Johann Cruyff. But at that second meeting, it became unanimous for Sven. I have to say I did corral everyone in, admittedly with David Dein’s assistance. It was a case of: “OK, is everyone now 100 per cent up for this?” They were.’

Ridsdale begs to differ again. ‘For Adam to say he forced the issue is wrong. We followed a very methodical process. And if David feels he initiated it, that is disingenuous, because he wasn’t at the first meeting. With the benefit of hindsight, Adam might say: “I always had this solution in mind, I led them there,” but I don’t think that’s true because we started with a blank sheet of paper, worked through all the possibilities, and everybody had their particular suggestions written down.

‘I don’t remember who first mentioned Eriksson – it might have been Adam, to be fair. I said Bobby Robson. I was saying that whatever we did, we should have the next man in place, so we wouldn’t have to go through the whole process again from scratch. The young bucks, maybe two or three coaches, should work alongside the main man, so that a ready-made successor could come from Peter Taylor, Steve McClaren or Bryan Robson, whose names all came up.’

Had Dein blocked any move in Wenger’s direction? Ridsdale was adamant that he did not. ‘People said because I was on the sub-committee, David [O’Leary] couldn’t be picked, which was a joke. He was on the list, but what had he done? He was never seriously considered for that reason. The same people said Wenger couldn’t get the job because of David [Dein], but it was at that first meeting that Sven emerged as our preferred foreign candidate, and David wasn’t even there. Wenger was considered, as was Alex Ferguson, but Sven was the number one non-English choice.’

Dein, away on Arsenal business, could have been contacted by mobile phone, but was not consulted either before or during that first meeting. Had he had any input? ‘No,’ Ridsdale said, emphatically. ‘Well, I know he didn’t speak to me, or to Dave Richards, Noel White or Howard Wilkinson. To Crozier … who knows? But Crozier never said: “I’ve spoken to Dein and we wouldn’t get Arsene Wenger.”’

For the second meeting, it was Ridsdale’s turn to be absent, on club business. Everybody else was present, Dein included. Ridsdale says: ‘All I know about what happened was from a briefing I had straight afterwards by phone, and that was to say that the second meeting had confirmed the conclusions of the first, and that thereafter Adam had the authority to go and try to get Sven.’