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Search: ' Sven-Goran Eriksson'

Stories

Tied up in Notts: how the availability of parking spaces turned me into a County fan

407 Notts

When there’s no history of football support in your family, the team you’re taken to see as a child can hinge on some unromantic factors

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Sven: My Story

323 Svenby Sven-Göran Eriksson
Headline, £20
Reviewed by Barney Ronay
From WSC 323 January 2014

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When it comes to blockbusting autumn autobiographies this was always destined to be the Other One. Ah, Sven. Is there a more glazed, jaded and – here at least – unexpectedly fascinating major player in English football’s most recent decade of plenty? Sven-Göran Eriksson may not have Alex Ferguson’s trophy haul, planetary-scale publisher’s advance or enduring sense of heft. He may have spent the last five seasons in retreat from the years of Peak Sven, when he seemed permanently ensconced among the sober suited managerial elite, catnip to the billionaire, darling of the tabloids, golden-handshaked by assorted FAs and fossil-fuel newbie-powers.

He may have emerged at the end of it all, at least judging by Sven: My Story, as an oddly chastened and soulful one-time master of the universe, assailed not just by law suits and malevolent ex-girlfriends but by doubts, fears and regrets. But he definitely has the more interesting book, and by some distance too. In fact My Story is a genuine treat from its oddly fractured opening pages, all present tense and angsty, existential regret – “it is early December and the first snow has just arrived” – the football manager’s autobiography as reimagined by Bret Easton Ellis.

As early as page six we find Sven being swindled out of his fortune by a financial adviser and dismissing Nancy Dell’Olio with “We met in Rome during my time at Lazio. She was irresistible, then”. This is the familiar softly spoken, equivocal Sven, but fretted now with melancholy and producing after some delicately sketched lines on his childhood (“I was born into secrecy”) one of the more memorable football books of recent years.

There is a brilliant, and at times rather forgotten, managerial story in here: from the rise to precocious success at IFK Gothenburg, to glory in Portugal and Italy, to the initially giddy England years. There are plenty of laughs, many of them unintentional (as a young man Sven wrote a doctoral thesis on the 4-4-2 formation, and its unbending application in all circumstances). And there is footballing insight too, from the “revolution against individualism” of Sweden’s tactical awakening in the 1970s (sped by the young Roy Hodgson), through Sven’s dealings with Boniek, Baggio, Beckham and the rest.

Plus there is of course lots of sex. Before long we’re hearing about Sven’s first girlfriend whose father “ran a support group for people who had been caught shooting moose illegally”. Later indiscretions include the occasion Sven was discovered reclining nude on the sofa of a cuckolded husband and ended up walking home through the streets of Stockholm without his trousers, through the familiar tabloid narrative of Nancy, Ulrika Jonsson and assorted others.

Throughout it is a strangely taut and vulnerable account, with a jarring skin of honesty. This is not so much a football book as the story of a man trapped in a series of scenes, a machinery of desire and ambition that seems at times to have overwhelmed him. Towards the end, while coaching in China, Sven describes going out for a bicycle ride on his own just after reading the proofs of My Story for the first time. “I felt depressed. Where had the years gone? My children? Friends? The women? Time? It hurt to think back.”

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Pause and effect

wsc303The lack of a winter break is more of an excuse than an explanation for the failure of English teams, says Adam Bate

As we approach the climax of another English football season, it is perhaps only to be expected that there should be the usual talk of tiring bodies. Equally unsurprising is the now familiar demand for the introduction of that much-vaunted miracle cure: the winter break. A two-week gap in the fixture list has long been viewed as the answer to English football’s problems. Fabio Capello claimed “all the players were really tired” after England’s miserable performance at the World Cup in 2010. His thoughts were echoed by one of his predecessors, Sven-Göran Eriksson, who added: “It’s more difficult for England than other countries to do well in a big tournament. You need a break.”

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Letters, WSC 301

wsc301Dear WSC
Gavin Duenas asks why WSC readers want standing areas in football grounds (Letters, WSC 300). My reasons are purely selfish. Maybe then the people stand in front of me and my two young boys “because you can only support your team properly from a standing position” will go to the terraces and leave us to sit and enjoy an unobstructed view from our expensive seats.There should be a choice for all supporters between sitting and safe standing. Yet as a frequent away supporter in “all-seater” stadiums, the choice of sitting doesn’t actually exist. You are forced into unsafe standing in seating areas if you want to to see anything of the game. Woe betide you if you point out that if everybody sits, everybody sees. Oh for the joy of Huish Park and London Road, where thanks to the terraces you can still sit in comfort.
Andrew Bartlett, Kenilworth

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Back to front

By moving their central defenders forward into midfield, English managers are taking a tactical step backwards, says Adam Bate

After the initial excitement, it only took a few difficult games for questions to be raised about Phil Jones. “In the end… Jones is there to stop, not start, the fun,” wrote Paul Hayward in the Guardian. And he is right, of course. A defender should be able to defend. Less understandable is the desire to move Jones into midfield – as Alex Ferguson did against Liverpool – simply because he can trap a football. It seems that Jones is just the latest victim of English football’s love affair with converting the centre-half.

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