Sven-Goran Eriksson

CHAPTER SEVEN ON BOARD WITH TORD

‘Tord Grip is my eyes, and one of the best coaches in the world. Nobody has the feeling for football in his blood like he has.’

SVEN-GORAN ERIKSSON.

Tord Grip is Eriksson’s assistant and long-time confidante. They have a relationship that dates back over 30 years, during which time their roles have reversed. When they first worked together, in 1970, Grip was the manager and Eriksson the worst player in his run-of-the-mill team of Swedish part-timers. Later, Grip ran Sweden’s Under-21s, with Eriksson his assistant.

Tord Grip was born in 1938, one of four children fathered by a woodcutter in the tiny village of Ytterhogdal. There was no professional football in Sweden when he left school, so he went to work in the local bakery. By the time he was 18, his father had branched out into haulage, graduating from a horse to a tractor to a truck, and he invited young Tord to join the business but the offer was rejected. ‘It was heavy work, and I wasn’t built for that,’ Grip says. ‘The bakery was perfect. I started work at six in the morning and finished at two, so I had plenty of time for football.’ All the training paid off. At 18 he moved from the village team to Degerfors, in the top division of the Swedish league. ‘For the first year there I carried on in the bakery, after that I went to work in a steel mill. There was no money for playing football, not even proper expenses. My father would drive me 450 km from where we lived to Degerfors, for which the club gave him £5.’ Grip, unlike Eriksson, was a top player, an old-fashioned inside-right who was to play for more than a decade in the Swedish Premier League, and win three international caps. He played for Degerfors from 1953 until 1966, during which time he had trials with Aston Villa, then under the management of Joe Mercer. ‘I came over and played three games for the reserves, but nothing came of it,’ he told me. Instead, he transferred to AIK Stockholm for a couple of seasons before becoming player-manager of Karlskoga, then in Division Two. He takes up the story of his fateful conjunction with Eriksson as follows:

‘We were promoted to the First Division, and then one afternoon in 1970/71 Sven came and asked me if he could train with us. He was studying to be a PE teacher at Orebro, just as I had done. He wasn’t specializing in football, as some have said. He wanted to be a PE teacher. We had a good team at that time, very close to getting in the Premier League, and I thought he’d struggle to get a game, but eventually he did get in the side. His technique wasn’t very good, but he worked at it on his own. He was the right full-back, playing immediately behind me, so he had to learn to defend, because I couldn’t. He always reminds me: “You told us that when we lost possession everyone should drop back and defend. Everyone except you, that is. You never did it.”

‘I was five years at Karlskoga. In 1974/75 I quit playing and became manager of Orebro, in the Premier League. Sven stayed and played on for Karlskoga, but then he got badly injured and didn’t play for a year. From Orebro I went back to Degerfors. I went back to work in the steel factory there, in their rehabilitation department, and also to manage my old club, who were now in the Second Division. I knew about Sven’s ambition, so I asked him to join me. He would have been 28.’

The manager immediately had the awkward task of telling his new recruit that he had no future as a player, and that he should concentrate on coaching. ‘Tord telling me that I would be better off if I stopped playing was not very nice,’ Eriksson says. ‘For a long time I regretted not fulfilling my ambition to play in Italy, but I’m over that now.’

Grip takes up the story: ‘He became my assistant, and we worked together like that in 1975. Then I got an offer from the Swedish FA, to run the Under-16 team and be assistant to the Sweden manager, Georg Ericsson. We qualified for the 1978 World Cup, in Argentina. Anyway, in 1976 Sven took over at Degerfors. He was in charge for three years.’ Two decades passed before master and pupil were to be reunited.

Degerfors, two hours’ drive from Torsby, is a frost-bitten town of 10,000 inhabitants, with a local football club not unlike Charlton Athletic. Runners-up in the top division twice, most recently in 1963, they have led a yo-yo existence since, but have forged strong links with the community, and consequently enjoy more support than they might otherwise expect. The clubhouse is full of merchandise – fleeces, T-shirts, mugs, schnapps glasses, hats, scarves etc – but noticeably short on Eriksson memorabilia, although there is an England 2006 calendar in the corridor, a relic of the failed bid to stage the next World Cup.

Degerfors have punched above their weight in producing 23 players for the national team, all of whom have their pictures in a make-shift gallery in the equivalent of the Liverpool ‘Boot Room’, where the kit man, Karsten Kurkkio, holds court. Kurkkio, 56, has worked for the club for longer than he can remember, in a voluntary capacity before he was put in charge of the kit. His room, he says proudly, is used by the coaches when they draw up their training schedules over coffee. Dashing hither and thither, he points to the snapshots of distinguished former players on the walls, where Olof Mellberg, of Aston Villa, was the latest addition. Pride of place, however, went to the legendary Gunnar Nordahl, possibly Sweden’s most famous player of all time. Born in 1921, Gunnar was one of five brothers, all of whom played at top level. A goalscoring phenomenon, the best of the brood began his career with Degerfors, before moving on to Norrkoping, whom he shot to four successive championships, with 93 goals in 92 appearances. Gunnar Nordahl won a gold medal for football at the London Olympics, in 1948, forming with Gunnar Gren and Nils Liedholm the celebrated Gre-No-Li trio. All three played professionally in Italy, where they made a huge impact, Nordahl joining Milan, and scoring a record 210 goals, collecting Serie A titles in 1951 and 1955. After a brief spell with Roma, he returned home to coach Norrkoping. He died in 1995. ‘He was our best,’ Kurkkio said, reverentially. ‘Sven-Goran Eriksson was not a good player. Tord Grip, on the other hand … Now he was good. He ran and ran.’

Kurkkio remembered Eriksson best for the innovation which saw Degerfors use a sports psychologist for the first time. The engagement of Dr Willi Railo started a collaboration which endured for 25 years. The guided tour of his dark domain complete, the kit man passed me on to Degerfors’s latest manager who, with ice on the pitch, had taken his charges inside for midweek training in a hall that doubles as a basketball arena. Dave Mosson is the sort of gnarled Scot you stumble across coaching in remote outposts all over the world. Going into 2002, he was in his third stint at Degerfors, having initially replaced Eriksson in 1979. Originally from Glasgow, he was apprenticed to Nottingham Forest, under Johnny Carey. By way of residential qualification, he played for the England youth team, but realizing early that he might not be good enough to make a decent career out of playing the game, he attended Loughborough College as a PE student, and made the move to Sweden after his fiancée’s father, who was on the board at Karlstad FC, invited him over for a trial. ‘I did quite well, and I’ve been here ever since.’ He has coached five different clubs in the Swedish First Division.

Mosson first met Eriksson as a player. ‘I played for Karlstad and Sven for Karlskoga, the neighbouring town, so we came up against one another quite a few times. He was a very ordinary right-back. You would never have noticed him in a game. He never kicked his winger or overlapped much. He just did his job as best he could. I don’t think anybody in those days admired how he played football, but he was very passionate. The game has always been a passion for him.’

The expatriate Scot was later in charge of the coaching course which set Eriksson on the path to greater glory. Was the England coach-to-be a natural? ‘Yes, I’d say he was. Some are, some aren’t. He was not the dynamic sort. Some use a lot of vocals and gesticular [sic] action, and are generally dynamic in the way they work. He was never like that. He did things methodically, talking a lot. He was always a good communicator. When he talks now, of course, people are more inclined to listen.’

When Mosson took over from Eriksson at Degerfors they had just missed out on promotion from the First Division. ‘Under the Swedish system,’ he explained, ‘it wasn’t enough to win your division, you also had to get through a play-off system to get up. Under Sven, they were in the play-offs twice, and were promoted once. I took them up straight away.’ At this stage, it became apparent that Mosson was holding something back. There was an ambivalence behind the praise. When I mentioned this, there was a pregnant pause before he decided not to reveal all. ‘I won’t tell you what Sven was really like, because I don’t think it would do anybody any good. Let’s just say that he’s very good at maintaining a front.’ No amount of prompting and pressing would persuade him to elucidate. Steering a determined course away from the dangerous waters he had ventured into, he went on: ‘Sven has learned to keep his cool, to stay inside his shell. Swedes do that. They are very polite and reserved. They don’t like to be associated with any diversionary activity. He lived his life here no differently to anybody else. He was a family man fairly early, marrying a girl from Amal, which is between Karlstad and Gothenburg, and quickly having a couple of children [Johann and Lina]. When he came on to the coaching scene, there was never any scandal. He just got on with life.’

Mosson was the first of many to hint that Eriksson had always been something of a ladies’ man. As a coach, Eriksson had always been an anglophile. ‘Right from his early days, Sven was heavily influenced by the English style of play, zonal defence and 4–4–2,’ Mosson said. ‘When he did his final coaching course over here, he had to submit a written paper, which I read, and that’s what he did it on – his adaptation of the English game.’ Bobby Robson was something of a mentor in the late 1970s, Eriksson journeying to Portman Road to study the methods and pick the brains of the manager who was rivalling mighty Liverpool’s preeminence in England with unfashionable Ipswich. Eriksson recalls: ‘I went to Ipswich on a Friday and watched the team train. I asked Bobby Robson if I could put some questions to him after training, and we ended up sitting in his office for two or three hours, talking about football. Fantastic. He didn’t know me, and I was no one. He asked if I was coming to see the game the next day, and if I had a ticket. I said I was going to buy one. “Well,” he said, “do you want to sit on the bench with me?” Can you imagine? I was sitting next to him and the game was being shown live in Sweden. Beautiful. He is a very special man.’

Mosson’s predecessor as manager at Degerfors, Kenneth Norolling, has also known Eriksson for many years, and says: ‘Tord Grip and Svennis were the first coaches in Sweden to take ideas from England. That’s where they got the 4–4–2 system and the flat back four. They took ideas from Bob Houghton [the Englishman who took Malmo to the 1979 European Cup Final] and Roy Hodgson, at Halmstad. There was a lot of discussion in Sweden around that time about how we should play, who we should follow. Tord was the first Swede to copy the English system, followed by Sven.’

Hodgson told me: ‘From 1974 to 1980, of the six Swedish championships available, Bob won three and I won two. Then Bob and I left Sweden [to go to Bristol City together] and there was a period of Gothenburg domination until 1985, when Malmo took over. All credit to Tord and Sven who were the first to hitch on to our bandwagon. To be honest, there’s nothing really new in the game. All of us, somewhere along the line, have looked at somebody who has done something and been successful and thought: “Yeah, that’s me, that’s what I want to do as well.” For me and Bob it was Don Howe and Dave Sexton. With Sven, it was probably more Bob than me, because he was the first.

‘Fair play to them, Tord and Sven had to fight a lot of battles because Bob and I weren’t popular in Sweden in those days. Not only had we anglicized their game, but we had locked out the Swedish coaches when it came to winning things, and they didn’t like it. We engendered great loyalty among our players, and it became a bit of a war between the Halmstad–Malmo faction and the rest of Sweden, including the football federation and the media. Tord and Sven aligned themselves with us, the group that was under fire, which can’t have been easy. But then, when they did it our way and gained their own success, our methods became popular everywhere because it was no longer the English who were doing it. In 1979, though, there were only three clubs playing with a back four, zonally, and pressurizing: Bob’s, mine and Sven’s. All the others were still playing the German way, man for man.

‘The national coach was a guy called Lars Arnesen, and he was one of the bastions of anti-British feeling. “This is not the right way to play,” he said. “It stifles initiative and turns players into robots.” All the old claptrap. But the national team had a strong contingent of Sven’s Gothenburg players, and they went to Arnesen and told him: “We’ve had enough of this system of yours. The way Gothenburg play is the way we should, too.”

‘I got to know Sven and Tord in 1979 and 1980, and felt an affinity with them because they’d had the courage to go with us. Other Swedish coaches were distancing themselves from us, but Sven and Tord said: “No, this is good football, this is the way football should be played. It’s how we’re going to play.” Tord took over the national Under–21 team, with Sven as his assistant, and they played the English way while the seniors were still sticking to their guns. I know they came under all sorts of pressure, but they stood up to the criticism, and I think the experience probably did Sven good. Taking on a fight like that prepared him for what happened later at Benfica, and in Italy.’

Grip told me: ‘When Sven started to work for me at Degerfors, I was the one with the experience in coaching and management. I was ahead of him in that respect, so I suppose I helped him to learn how to organize a team. At that time, a lot of coaches in Sweden were learning new ways. It was a period when we were starting to update our methods. It was an exciting time – a time of constant improvement. We took a lot, including our playing style, from England. The physical requirements we had already. There is not much else to think about in Sweden during the winter! Our strength was always our strength. It was when the other countries caught up with our fitness levels that we had to improve our organization. In Sweden, we’ve never been great technically, so we had to organize our teams cleverly and work hard to compensate. We did that.’

After Grip had left, Eriksson took Degerfors to the Third Division championship in his first season in management. The play-off system, involving four regional winners, was known as the Kval. At the end of 1976, Degerfors lost all three games, and were not promoted. In 1977, they did marginally better when, having won the league again, they took only two points from three matches in the Kval. In 1978 they made it third time lucky, winning the Third Division, by five points from Karlskoga, and all three games in the play-offs to go up to Division Two (North).

Eriksson attributed the decisive improvement to the work of Willi Railo. He says: ‘My team always played well in the Kval, but when it came to the play-off, we’d mess up. At my invitation, Willi came and worked with us for one whole day. He made a cassette for individual players to listen to so that they could practise mental training on their own. We even stopped the bus on the way to the match so that they could use their cassettes to prepare mentally. We won the play-off and went up.’

People were starting to take notice.

CHAPTER EIGHT INTO THE BIG TIME

Gothenburg is where Swedish football began, and is the city that is most passionate about the game. The oldest club in existence today, Orgryte IS, formed there in 1887, as did the first governing body, in 1895. IFK Gothenburg, founder members of the league in 1904, have long been Sweden’s most successful and best-supported club, having won more championships than any other. When Sven-Goran Eriksson, of little Degerfors, heard they wanted to speak to him in 1979, he assumed that if there was a job on offer it would be with the youth team. He was wrong. At 34, Svennis had arrived in the big time.

Sven Carlsson was the finance director on the Gothenburg board at the time of the appointment. How had they identified Eriksson in the obscurity of the lower divisions? ‘It was well known that we were looking for a trainer, and Sven-Goran was recommended to us as one who was particularly good at youth development,’ Carlsson told me. ‘So the club president, Bertil Westblad, called him and he came to speak to us. We liked him straight away, and he agreed to take the job.’

It could have been one of the shortest appointments on record. After losing each of his first three games in charge, Eriksson called a team meeting and told the players, who had scorned the arrival of this ‘nobody’ from the backwoods, that if they wanted him out, he would go. It was a winning gamble, a turning point. He had confronted them and they admired him for it. So what if he was not the big name they had expected? They liked his style. One of the club’s best players was Glenn Hysen, the cultured central defender who was to win 70 international caps in a distinguished career which took him to PSV Eindhoven, Fiorentina (with Eriksson again) and Liverpool. Now retired, and back in Gothenburg, where he works as a commentator with Swedish television, Hysen says: ‘When Sven was appointed, he was a complete nobody. He walked into the dressing room, and all the players thought: “Who are you?” Here was this really shy man, who had been the manager of a little team called Degerfors, and now he was suddenly in charge of the biggest club in the country. We had never heard of him, as a player or as a coach, and it took us a while to get used to him and respect him. We made a terrible start, losing our first three matches that season, which was almost unheard of at Gothenburg.

‘In the third game we lost to a side newly promoted, and afterwards Sven asked the whole team if we wanted him to quit. He said he would walk away if we wanted him to. We all agreed that it was too early for him to resign, and decided we would give it time to see how things worked out. The rest is history. Sven won the UEFA Cup with Gothenburg, who became the first Swedish club ever to win a European trophy.

‘Now I hear he’s incredibly popular in England, but if that Gothenburg side had told him to go, his career might never have recovered. I don’t think he would have ended up working in a Volvo factory, but nor do I think he would have gone on to become a top manager if he had walked out of his first big job after three games.’

In 1978, Gothenburg finished third in the league, a distant seven points behind the champions, Osters Vaxjo. In Eriksson’s first season they were runners-up, just one point behind Halmstad, and they won the Swedish Cup, thrashing Atvidabergs 6–1 in the final. The championship had its most dramatic denouement for many years, boiling down to a last-day finish between Gothenburg and Halmstad, who were coached by Roy Hodgson. Halmstad were at home to relegation-bound AIK Stockholm, Gothenburg away to mid-table Hammarby. At halftime in the two games, when it was 0–0 in Halmstad and Gothenburg were leading (they won 3–2), it looked like Eriksson’s title, but Hodgson’s team scored twice in the second half to clinch it.

Hodgson remembers it well: ‘I’d been at Halmstad since 1976. In 1979 we led the league from start to finish, but we were lucky when we played Gothenburg at home in the autumn. We were top but they were having a good spell, winning games while we were drawing, and therefore closing the gap. When we played them, we were very fortunate. We won because the referee disallowed them what was a perfectly good goal. Our defence had pushed out, one of their strikers stayed in, and when the ball came to him he looked 20 yards offside. But what the referee and linesman hadn’t picked up was that it was a backpass from one of our defenders. That goal, had it stood, would have put them 1–0 up, and made it a very different game. Instead, we went on to win 2–1. We continued on our way, staying top but faltering a bit because we weren’t winning every game and Gothenburg were, and we came to the last day with only one point in it. We were at home to AIK, who were a poor team, and all we had to do was get the same result as Gothenburg. But if we drew and they won, they’d take the title on goal difference. They had a difficult away game, against Hammarby, in Stockholm.

‘We had a full house. The capacity at Halmstad was only 16,000, but fans were packed into our little stadium, waiting to celebrate a championship which we’d been on course for, really, from the first day. In 26 rounds of matches, we’d been top for 23. It was a big day for a small club – Halmstad had a population of barely 40,000 – and the players were nervous. We played very poorly in the first half, and should have been 2–0 down at half-time, but they missed a couple of gilt-edged chances, and we came in at 0–0. In the second half we scored a wonder goal after five minutes, and that settled the players down. We went on to win quite comfortably, 2–0, but I shall never forget that first half, when they could have put us away. Gothenburg had won as well, so we were champions by a single point.’

Runners-up and cup winners, it had hardly been a bad season for IFK, but not everybody was happy. Frank Sjoman, a respected journalist, wrote: ‘Eriksson has been at variance with the ideals of the fans since, like most managers, he wants results before anything. Before long, he had introduced more tactical awareness, workrate and had tightened the old cavalier style. The result has been that while Gothenburg are harder to beat, they are also harder to watch, and though they were challenging for the title, the average gate dropped by 3,000 to 13,320 – still the best in the country.’

Eriksson was changing from the traditional sweeper-controlled, man-for-man marking defence, to what became known as ‘Swenglish’ 4–4–2. He had taken the ferry across the North Sea to study Bobby Robson’s methods at Ipswich, and also journeyed to Liverpool’s Melwood training ground to learn from Bob Paisley, the most successful English manager of all time. Bobby Ferguson, then Robson’s assistant, said: ‘He [Eriksson] would stand by the side of the training pitch and note down everything. He never took his eyes off Bobby, and how he was organizing things.’

Glenn Schiller, a defensive midfielder who had come up through the youth team, recalled that it was almost a case of playing by numbers at first. ‘I remember it as if it was yesterday,’ he told me. ‘We worked all the time on pressing the opposition and running in support of the man on the ball. Svennis would place us like chess pieces on the training pitch. “You stand here, you go there,” and so on. It was hard work. The biggest problem was fitting all the pieces together and getting them all to move in harmony. The defensive part was the key to it all. When we were attacking, there was a fair amount of freedom to express ourselves, but we had to defend from strict, zonal starting positions.’

The new ‘Swenglish’ was deeply unpopular at first, but in fairness, the Gothenburg team that won the cup (needing extra-time and penalties to see off Orebro on the way) scored 29 goals in seven games in the process, which suggests ‘the old cavalier style’ was not entirely a thing of the past. Apart from the 20-year-old Hysen, notable members of that side included Torbjorn Nilsson, the most accomplished player in Sweden, who could scheme as well as score, 19-year-old Glenn Stromberg, an attacking midfielder who played in 24 of the 26 matches in his breakthrough season, and Olle Nordin, the team captain and engine room artificer.