One way or another the subject of Sven has been doing the rounds a little. Here’s my take:
According to Joe Lovejoy of the Times, Adam Crozier’s selection of Sven was driven by the desire to get a coach with an outstanding CV in every department, not least a track record of success wherever he had been. England needed a superman. Crozier and his team identified Sven as the man they wanted, landed him, and expected great things. We might contrast this with Steve McLaren’s selection:
Track record of success? Average results with a decent budget at Middlesbrough, team in freefall and general chaos as recently as this January. McLaren swung that around (and in time someone will write a book telling the inside story: Jimmy-Floyd? Viduka?) and rode a lottery winner’s luck and Massimo Maccarone’s sense of occasion into a European final. Before that he had a good reputation at Derby and Man Utd.
Contrast this with Sven. He won trophies in Sweden, Portugal and Italy, taking unfancied teams to European finals (ok, double standards, McLaren did that too, but in the 80s European competitions were very different to now.) along the way.
Sven took over an England team that had just lost at home to Germany in the last ever game at Wembley. The outgoing manager, Kevin Keegan, was a player-friendly and likeable man, but admitted he was out of his depth at the top level. From then Sven perfected the art of scraping the right points from the right games, and England became very efficient in qualifying well for tournaments. Lovejoy, in his book “Sven” quotes a former (recent) England player who said “my dad could qualifty us for tournaments, but Sven is paid to win the big games”. Well there’s a truth here, but it misses the mark slightly. We didn’t qualify in 1994, and plenty of equally talented teams have missed big tournaments since. We take this sort of thing for granted, but qualifiers are vital, and Sven was good at them.
So what about the second part of that quote, that Sven was paid to win the big games (and didn’t)? Guilty, I suppose. 2002 is annoying because in retrospect it was the most open tournament for a long time. England got through a hellish group, negotiating Argentina, Nigeria and our, bete-noir, Sweden. Looking back, qualifying in second place didn’t really help (Senegal and then Turkey would have followed, which would have seen us play Brazil in the semis in the evening rather than the midday sun), but it was an achievement to get through (Argentina and Nigeria didn’t). Denmark were swept aside with understated ease, and then we lost to Brazil after taking the lead and a numerical advantage. David Seaman got himself lobbed and that was that. The team wilted in the heat and were powerless to hang on. These things do happen in football, particularly at the top level where games are decided on the smallest of issues. I think Sven understood this but a laissez-faire attitude won’t do in England, and he got criticised fairly heavily.
Euro 2004 saw the chance for Sven to flex his muscles with a team that was somewhere near its peak. I think we’ll look back at this side with a little regret in years to come, I think it’s as good a unit as we’ve fielded for a long time. It should not be forgotten that Sven played his part in the players’ develpment. Here’s the team that played France:
James; Neville; King; Campbell; Cole; Beckham; Scholes; Lampard; Gerrard; Owen; Rooney.
That’s a good list, but more importantly, these players were all around their peak, Beckham excepted. Carlos Quieroz was in charge of Real Madrid that season and said that Beckham’s attitude to training was poor compared to that of Luis Figo, for whatever that’s worth. Whatever, our captain was not at his best. Had he been I think this team was good enough to win it all.
Consider the games. Against France, at this point the holders of both available major international trophies. Leading 1-0 Beckham missed a penalty that would have made the game safe. England lost 2-1 from two late goals, but it should never have come to that and the defeat cannot be blamed on Sven.
Switzerland and Croatia were crushed, Wayne Rooney exploding onto the international scene with gusto, thundering his way through shell-shocked defences. In the knockouts England led early again, but lost Rooney to injury and never re-grouped. Sven is blamed here, and perhaps with reason, but (home side) Portugal hit England with a whirlwind of attacking football and better teams than England would have struggled to contain them. Still, England had a legitimate goal disallowed (the unlucky Sol Campbell), and could easily have triumphed. Instead a defeat on penalties followed, and that was that. Greece beat Portugal in the final, but it should have been England. Sven’s fault? His biggest crime here was to be unlucky. 8 times in 10 England would have won that game.
Perhaps Sven should have left at this point. Certainly by the time 2006 came around he seemed jaded, and the players seemed less ebullient on the field. Somehow the team seemed less fluent, more conservative. Perhaps Sven had decided that the tournament success that had eluded him was to be found in a more defensive approach. This might explain why the 2006 version of Sven’s England played as they did. It might have worked, but the team that huffed and puffed its way to another penalty shoot-out defeat in Germany always seemed to be teetering on the brink of elimination. The players always said that they’d rise to the occasion soon, but it never happened and a poor series of games will not be looked back on with any fondness.
This does reflect on Sven, I think. By now the press had thrown the kitchen sink at him, not least for his off-pitch life that was nothing excessive by today’s public-figure standards, but equally, a red-rag to the press bull, all things considered.
Where does this leave us? A manager who took an average team and made them good, but was not able (through a variety of factors) to turn this into tangible success. We must remember that all England managers seem to outstay their welcome, the vilification of Sir Alf Ramsey towards the end of his reign being a prime example. Sir Alf had even won the World Cup, but times change and the press wanted a new man. They got Don Revie then Joe Mercer, and England failed to qualify for the 1978 World Cup. After that Ron Greenwood took a talented squad to Spain, and as usual England fell after playing well but not quite well enough. Sven’s critics suggest that he has underwhelmed despite having world class talent, but the 1982 team was drawn from a league that was dominating European club competition. Bobby Robson had his fair share of ups and downs, and ended on a high note that nobody would have predicted in 1988 when his team lost embarrassingly to everyone it faced in the European Championships. Did he achieve more than Sven? Possibly. But it’s a close run thing. Then the nineties! England missed the USA World Cup, stumbled to the semi-finals in the 1996 (home) tournament despite playing poorly in three games along the way, and showed signs of life in 1998 before losing on penalties again. The managers behind the nineties England teams were a mixed bunch (and more numerous by far than any other decade’s collection) but can any of them reasonably say that they made a better fist of things than Sven? I don’t think so.
