Sven and sweet FA
FRANK KEATING
Ihad been ploughing on at my desk in the usual desultory way a couple of weeks ago, tootling out some tripe to greet the start of the new soccer season — already upon us, can you believe? — when, like a perfectionist Hollywood poet. I had to scrunch up the paper and toss it with a frustrated curse into the wastepaper bin. Pondering England's imminent World Cup qualifiers. I realised it could be some time before we knew whether the saturnine Swedish supremo of the squad would ever again stare out, ferrety and frigidly forbearing. from England's touchline bench. For Sven-Goran Eriksson was once again hanging desperately on to his job, as well as his underpants. It is a story which will run and run.
Before the latest ton of tabloids fell on Sven, my self-spiked scribbles had been musing without malice on what the Swede actually did for his whopping £4 million annual salary from the Football Associa
tion. It is zillions more than is earned by any other international team manager and, to be frank and for all the overbearing hype-hype hoorays, in the two single matches of his stewardship which have mattered — the 2002 World Cup quarterfinal and ditto the Euro this summer in Portugal — his England team has been feebly and pallidly defeated as its coach sat, infuriatingly impenetrable and meditative, on the sidelines sipping water. More Zen than Sven.
With England playing fewer matches than there are months in the year, all I had been asking was what, for his lorryloads of money. did Eriksson actually do all day? He has always claimed to 'put in a full day' at the FA office. But what precisely did he do there? His expenses, certainly. Organise his VIP ticket for Saturday's Premiership match? Obviously. Reply to a few requests from schoolboys for his autograph? Then what? Sit at his home-fromhome self-assembled Ikea desk, head in hands, and ponder for hour upon hour the whys and wherefores of 4-3-3 or 4-2-4? Or the 'midfield diamond' formation? Or fret about his batting-order top-five for the next penalty shoot-out, or perhaps doodle over the colour co-ordination of England's new goalkeeper's jersey? We knew only two things for sure about Sven — that, give or take a couple of makeweights on the subs' bench, the make-up of his England team and its captain has been just about set in stone throughout his period in charge, and that the Swede definitely does not rehearse Churchillian or Agincourt speeches for use in the dressing-room at half-time. Now, at last, we can imagine all too vividly what has been filling his time in the office.
It is 40 years since England first appointed a full-time manager. The first, lugubrious Alf Ramsey, was the only one to win anything. was awarded a £50 bonus and a knighthood but died broke, and his wife barred any FA representative from his funeral. The late Don Revie pre-empted the sack by furtively sloping off abroad; Uncle Ron Greenwood brought a worried grace and charm to the job but no success; ditto Bobby Robson; dodgy deals did for Terry Venables, dodgy dogma for the Rev. Hoddle; Kevin Keegan admitted he couldn't cope, and then came sexpot Sven . . and, in tabloidspeak, you couldn't make it up, could you?
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