There is a perfectly reasonable argument that the inadequacies of his predecessors made the Swede look good, that his successor did likewise. It should be noted, though, that Glenn Hoddle and Kevin Keegan dropped 11 points in the qualifying group for Euro 2000; and that Steve McClaren dropped 13 points in the qualifying group for Euro 2008, the one that followed the Swede's "mutually agreed" departure; while Eriksson, in his two and three-quarters campaigns, dropped only 11 points in total. That is an achievement that should not be overlooked, even if Fabio Capello has outperformed the Swede's average this far.
Four of those points dropped came on days when England qualified for tournaments: the 2-2 draw with Greece in October 2001 and the goalless draw in Istanbul two years later. Four of those points were dropped early in campaigns, in 2-2 draws that cast a shadow over what followed and cost goalkeepers their places: against Macedonia in October 2002 and in Austria in September 2004.
The one qualifying defeat Eriksson suffered came in Belfast on 7 September 2005. It turned disquiet into open discontent, leading to a player being jeered as a proxy for the manager, and ensured that rather than England going to Germany with the manager's future up for discussion he had been paid off and Steve McClaren was the successor. And the petulance of one player foreshadowed Eriksson's final act.
England's 2006 World Cup qualifying campaign started off against the background of one of the most scandalous abuses of media power football has suffered. A month after the exit from Euro 2004, with Eriksson rightly going nowhere after qualification and such a narrow exit, a story that had no bearing on his abilities as a football coach was seized upon by the sheet-sniffers and others who should have known better. Unmarried man and woman have consensual sex is newsworthy if either is a religious leader or a "back to basics" moralist politician, say, but not if one is a football coach and the other a secretary at the Football Association.
Depressingly, the FA fell for it, too, with the attempt to sell out Eriksson to the News of the World leading to the departure of Faria Alam's other paramour, Mark Palios.
When that didn't work, elements of the media went gunning for individual players instead. David James's howler against Austria helped turn a comfortable win into an embarrassing 2-2 draw and he was deservedly dropped. But The Sun's decision to send a donkey named Mavis round Europe after James, suggesting that she would be a better choice, combined vindictiveness with hysteria.
After the win in Poland four days after the Austria draw, the England players made a point of coming over to our corner of the ground, a welcome gesture to those of us who had been in Vienna and now Chorzow. But the team refused to speak to reporters - as far as I was concerned, another welcome gesture.
Wins against Wales, Azerbaijan, Northern Ireland, Azerbaijan again and Wales again followed. None was especially convincing, some of them definitely unconvincing, but 19 points from seven games was a decent return to take to Belfast; Frank Lampard was prolific, Michael Owen was scoring respectably, and had Poland dropped any points beside the three England had taken then control of the group would have been assured.
As it was, under the qualifying format, the nine group winners were joined by the runners-up with the best record in going to Germany, and other results meant that by the evening of Saturday 3 September 2005, any two wins from England's last three matches would earn an automatic place. The recent friendly in Copenhagen had ended in a humiliating 4-1 defeat, but with the last two of the qualifiers at home and the first away to Northern Ireland, success seemed a racing certainty.
David Healy and England's worst performance under Eriksson took care of that. The goal, in the 74th minute, was no more than Northern Ireland - or England for that matter - deserved. A 4-3-3 formation utterly failed, as did a swap that left a four-man midfield with Joe Cole on the right, Steven Gerrard on the left, David Beckham in the middle and only Frank Lampard in his default position.
There was worse: not only had Eriksson lost control of his tactics, he had lost control of one player in particular. Wayne Rooney was one booking away from a suspension and seemed determined to get it, if not worse. Lashing out physically at opponents and verbally at team-mates, he showed the incontinent rage that wound up leaving its mark on Ricardo Carvalho, even if a yellow was all that resulted.
The morning after, Fleet Street was vengeful, and unlike over Alam they had the supporters with them. A month later Peter Crouch, in for the suspended Rooney, was scapegoated by the Saturday afternoon Old Trafford crowd even as he played in Michael Owen to win a decisive penalty against Austria: Crouch was an Eriksson pick, a controversial one at that, and, though he had been out of the squad the previous month and so played no part in Belfast, he was the focus of the rage. A couple of rash Beckham tackles meant England finished with 10 men, and at the end were playing long balls to Crouch's head when he had no team-mate within 20-odd yards. Which some in the crowd treated as Crouch's fault.
That Saturday night Holland beat the Czech Republic; England were guaranteed to be best runners-up even if they lost to Poland on the Wednesday. Celebrations were mute, dissatisfaction high, and beating Poland 2-1 did nothing to change that. With Rooney's ban over, Crouch featured only as a substitute, but his coming on set a stage for some boos. He subsequently began the move that led to the winner with some level-headed control and then a pass out of his own penalty area, but nothing he nor Eriksson could do was going to shift opinion quickly.
The "fake sheikh" so-called scandal followed, when the News of the World entrapped Eriksson into a series of bland confessions. After Belfast and the scenes at Old Trafford, Brian Barwick, the FA's chief executive in succession to Palios, looking for a populist gesture, wanted to pay off Eriksson's final two years, while the Swede was rightly fed up with a media determined to undermine him: the World Cup would be his swansong. A winning flourish to qualification could have led to the succession being at least held over until after the World Cup.
In a misplaced rush to find a successor, an approach to Luiz Felipe Scolari was botched: the Brazilian, still with a job to do with Portugal, was put off by the insane media circus. Another Fleet Street own-goal. The FA were obsessed with making an appointment before the World Cup, and that meant McClaren. Another FA own-goal.
Eriksson, for all his conservative, loyalist reputation, was a gambler happy to throw in Ashley Cole as a starter after 19 league games and Wayne Rooney as a 17-year-old. Demob happy, perhaps, he took a misplaced bet on a player lacking that duo's self-confidence. Maybe the fact he had nothing to lose - he was leaving the job anyway - played its part in the selection of Theo Walcott for the World Cup. And Rooney, when it came to it, delivered in the quarter-final against Portugal the self-destruction he had hinted at against Northern Ireland.
Still, at least he took Carvalho's testicles with him.
Philip Cornwall
Source: football.365.com
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