OBIT: Sven-Goran Eriksson didn’t waste time with anger or remorse

Sven-Goran Eriksson glimpsed how he would be treated in death many times before he died.

After he announced last January that he was suffering from terminal cancer, he travelled back through his life in football.

He was feted and celebrated wherever he went: in Genoa, the fans of Sampdoria, where he won the Coppa Italia, cheered him and sang his name and lit flares that turned the air blue and red.

At IFK Gothenburg, the team where he made his name as a manager when he led them to victory in the Uefa Cup in 1982, the fans stood and held up their club scarves horizontally and unfurled a giant banner of Eriksson as a young man.

At Benfica, where he won the Portuguese league title three times, 60,000 fans rose to applaud him in the Estadio da Luz and a phalanx of former players joined him on the pitch.

In Rome, where he led Lazio to the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1999 and the Serie A title in 2000, he was given a guard of honour before a match against Sassuolo at the Stadio Olimpico and a message flashed up on the giant screen that said: ‘Welcome Home.’

And in England, where Eriksson led the national team for close to six years, he fulfilled a dream by managing a Liverpool team, in a friendly match against Ajax Legends, and was given a rapturous reception at Anfield.

The secret to the affection that followed him throughout his career was rooted in much more than the outstanding successes that he achieved at club level and the moments of hope he oversaw with England.

His appeal lay in the fact that he never stopped behaving as though football had made him the luckiest man in the world.

And people loved that. They loved his enthusiasm for the game and his loyalty to his players and his reverence for the clubs and the countries he managed.

He did not waste any time on anger, resentment or regret. He lived his life with uncommon grace. When he was lampooned by critics, he never responded in kind. The worst that he did was turn the other way.

He never criticised his players in public and they loved him for that, too. His last act as England manager, in fact, was to plead with the media not to ‘kill’ Wayne Rooney after he had been sent off during England’s quarter-final elimination at the hands of Portugal during the 2006 World Cup.

And many loved him for his pursuit of hedonism. Football, it sometimes seemed, was a vehicle for him to chase prizes in his personal life that might otherwise have been beyond his reach.

‘Take care of yourself and take care of your life,’ Eriksson, who has died at the age of 76, said in the closing moments of the documentary made about him recently by Amazon Prime Video. ‘And live it.’

That was his philosophy and it was hard not to love him for it. Eriksson lived his best life. Even when controversy pursued him because of romantic entanglements or a job soured, he never complained. He just moved on.

That was admirable and it reflected an uncommon stoicism and generosity of spirit and absence of malice that made me admire him, too.

But there were also times in his reign as England manager when it felt as if you had no idea what Eriksson stood for, either as a man or a manager.

It was hard to pin any kind of principle on Sven. There was never any danger of him appearing a firebrand.

If Gareth Southgate stood up for what he thought was right, no one really knew what Eriksson thought was right. And perhaps that went better for him than it did for Southgate.

Winning the Serie A title with Lazio was probably Eriksson’s greatest achievement but he was best known for being the first foreign manager of England.

His appointment was hailed as progress by some and bemoaned as a crushing defeat for patriotism and English identity by others.

For the latter, the idea of a Swede taking over from Kevin Keegan in the last year of the 20th century represented a humiliating surrender.

As he got out of his car to attend his first press conference at the FA headquarters in Soho Square, Eriksson walked past a former policeman dressed as John Bull who held a lollipop stick bearing the message ‘No Surrender’ upon it.

His appointment also sparked a debate, which still burns today, about whether the nature of international football, where players are picked on the basis of nationality, means that employing a foreign coach is a form of cheating.

Eriksson oversaw some isolated highlights during his time with the FA and England’s 5-1 win over Germany in Munich in September 2001 – albeit in a qualifying tie – remains one of the great England memories of the last quarter of a century.

There was also a time, in the build-up to the 2004 European Championships and in the early stages of the tournament, where it felt as if the quality of the England squad and, in particular, the emergence of Rooney, had put England on the cusp of ending the wait for a major trophy.

But in his career as an international boss, at least, Eriksson was destined to be part of that damned lineage of England managers who could not end the years of hurt that still stretch out down the years from 1966.

Eriksson was not a great England manager. He was a good international boss, an intuitive man-manager who treated players like adults and an amiable, intelligent, thoughtful man.

But with the players he had at his disposal, many saw it as a waste that England’s ‘Golden Generation’ never got beyond the quarter-finals in his three major tournaments.

If that sounds familiar, it is because it was the charge that was levelled at Southgate from the moment his England team got to the final of Euro2020 but failed to beat Italy in the penalty shoot-out at the end of it.

Southgate, too, was accused of wasting the greatest generation of England players since Sir Alf Ramsey’s team won the World Cup in 1966.

But anyone who was around long enough to have seen the players who populated Eriksson’s teams at the 2004 Euros and the 2006 World Cup knows that they were superior to the players Southgate had at his disposal.

Eriksson was a victim of English football’s sense of entitlement in the same way that Southgate was but it may be the joy that he felt in his job, the joy we loved him for, was his weakness, too.

It often seemed as if he was in thrall to his star players, especially David Beckham. When Beckham was not fully fit, both in 2002 and 2004, Eriksson insisted on playing him. The same applied to Rooney in 2006.

I was a supporter of him in the face of some of the attacks aimed his way as England moved towards the 2006 World Cup and he became bogged down in off-the-field controversies.

One day in the run-up to that World Cup, he rang to thank me. Of course, I wanted him to do an interview but he declined. He felt that would not be fair to other reporters, which was typical of his style.

Eriksson indulged the cult of celebrity that grew up around the England team and their wives and girlfriends at that World Cup, in particular, and unwittingly allowed it to become a circus that distracted the players.

He was the father of the Wag culture that helped to define that era of excess and England’s presence at the tournament in Germany became more memorable for the daily promenade of the wives and girlfriends through the streets of Baden-Baden, where the squad was based, than for any of England’s performances on the pitch.

Tactically, when it became obvious that Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, two outstanding club players, did not play their best football when paired together in central midfield, Eriksson could not find another solution.

Paul Scholes, who kept a lower profile and did not attract the same headlines, was the player who suffered, shunted on to the left side of a bank of four.

There was bad luck, too. Who knows what would have happened if Rooney had not been injured against Portugal in the Euro 2004 quarter-final.

Maybe that tournament would have been Eriksson’s crowning glory but as it was, it ended in the bitter disappointment of another defeat in a penalty shoot-out.

Despite that, it does not feel as if Eriksson’s managerial career was unfulfilled. He drifted from job to job and country to country after he resigned as England boss in 2006 but it did not affect his legacy.

He achieved great things at Gothenburg, at Benfica, at Sampdoria and at Lazio. He was one of the best club managers of his era.

And beyond all of that, he had a gift that transcended all of that and which stayed with him until his dying day: he was full of so much joy, so much love for football and footballers, so much kindness and so much generosity of spirit that he made people happy.

More than any trophy or any victory, that is the greatest gift of all.