Sven, England and football’s sweetest bad love affair
During its coverage of England’s internationals, ITV used to have an animated title sequence of a white-washed trench run through the country’s most famous landmarks, set to Andrew Loog Oldham’s orchestral version of The Rolling Stones’ The Last Time, now more recognisable as The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony. The channel also occasionally pulled a Shakespearean actor out of the Dirty Duck to drum up some lines for a European qualifier against Macedonia or a pre-tournament friendly with Jamaica. Sven Göran-Eriksson, who we lost on Monday, was the first overseas manager to take the England job. It seems almost impatient now as we linger on eternally like the Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, but in 2006 England fans and tabloid media were very conscious of our 40-year trophy drought, and the country’s obsessional, doomed overtures at winning something was beginning to feel like a bitter curse or an increasingly bad love affair. A more appropriate use of Shakespeare might have been; My love is as a fever, longing still for that which longer nurseth the disease.
After their relatively mediocre performances prior to Paris 2024, some Australians wondered if simply wanting Olympic success more than your rivals was enough anymore. The England football team is an example of where wanting something too much actively defeats the objective. Eriksson arrived at Lancaster Gate at a time when the F.A. had raided the cupboard of all other homemade options. Kevin Keegan sensitively gave himself a vote of no confidence after a failed Euro 2000 and World Cup qualifier, whereas with his predecessors Glenn Hoddle and Terry Venables, their spiritual and business commitments had respectively outflanked the responsibilities of England. Graham Taylor before them had committed the unthinkable — failure to make it to USA 94 — a slow motion car crash or hurtling funeral cortege of a qualifying campaign captured stoically in the documentary An Impossible Job. Venables and Bobby Robson, who led the field of candidates, had already been there before.
Just under a year since Keegan’s resignation, Sven smashed Germany 5–1 and there was a monumental vibe shift towards the England team. Even Geordie ex-Republic of Ireland manager Jack Charlton had previously spoken against hiring a foreigner. But after the win in Munich a prevailing feeling was that England might have finally lifted the curse — the pragmatic, lateral thinking of an appointment based on ability rather than passport unburdened us from past failures, not at all an admission of defeat. England were expected to go on and qualify automatically, and despite a near-disastrous performance at Old Trafford against Greece — saved by a last-minute Beckham free kick — England had made it and that was all that mattered.
Sven’s unabashed predilections and disarming lust for life made him a sitting duck for the hostile tabloids who in the 00s had effectively captured the England team. After forgivingly being knocked out by the World Cup winners Brazil came the giddiness of Euro 2004 — the teenage Rooney played in such an irreverent way that made you feel like the traditional rules didn’t apply to us anymore. The fact that it all came crashing down to a familiar, premature end was almost irrelevant, what you remembered was the hype and how it made you feel. England had had a special tournament even if on paper and to everyone else, it was an incredibly mediocre outcome. The truth was, we were gaslighting ourselves, years before anyone knew about the England camp’s self-destruct black box, or that the compulsive wanting it in itself was obscuring us from seeing what winning a tournament actually looked like.
The endless summer of 2006 was when it was going to finally come good. England had an exceptional set of world class players, the fact that performances together had been fitful was a small detail to be ironed out by history. By this point Eriksson’s faustian waltz with the papers had already reached exhaustion and a Fake Sheikh was enough to send him out the door after the tournament, adding to the feeling that we were all heading for some kind of climax. The problem with romantic limerence is that it’s magical thinking, all red flags are ignored, whilst all signs of hope are gleefully foraged into a dramatic arc, where previous disappointments only contribute to a spectacular pay off that never arrives. England went out at exactly the same stage to exactly the same opponent, in exactly the same manner in Gelsenkirchen as they had done in the Euros — the Quarter Final — just the point before anything becomes too real, with all the trauma of a jilted date and the flood of excuses that followed.
In 2010, after a chaotic few post-Sven years which included the ignominy of not qualifying for Euro 2008, England were humbled 4–1 by a new generation of German talent in a near reverse of the 2001 Munich result, effectively deprogramming England supporters from what could be considered a sustained catfishing by the international football community. It probably began a healing process along with the decline of the tabloids that eventually bore fruit with Gareth Southgate’s manifestly more mindful, yet ultimately equally unconsummated era. For me, Sven is one of the greats because he was at heart a real fan — more English than the English — a romantic who had his head turned by countless promises and projects. He understood the spiritual assignment of the job, what winning something meant to the country, whether it was good for us or not. Maybe this was why he said that it was only England that could tempt him out of the very real world of club football.
RIP Sven, and thanks for all the dreaming.
