Sven-Goran Eriksson

For the first leg of the final, Benfica were well below strength. Nene was not fit enough to start, and had to be content with a place on the bench, Stromberg was suspended and Alves absent injured. The only goal in the first leg was an action replay of Anderlecht’s winner in the semi-final, Coeck turning cleverly to beat two defenders in the corner and finding Vercauteren, whose left-footed cross was buried by Brylle’s well-directed header. Any hope Benfica had of restoring the balance disappeared after 75 minutes, when midfielder Jose Luis Silva was sent off, for hacking down Brylle while the ball was out of play. Both managers professed themselves satisfied with the outcome. Van Himst said: ‘I’m not disappointed in the least with 1–0. Benfica are very awkward to play against. They work carefully and methodically to break up their opponents’ rhythm.’ Eriksson thought the final was nicely balanced. ‘We’re far from out of it,’ he said. ‘Before the game, I told people that a narrow defeat wouldn’t be a problem, and I haven’t changed my mind. Anderlecht are a good team, but so are we, and it’s still 50–50.’

For the decisive second leg, two weeks later, Nene and Stromberg were back, but now Filipovic was injured, and only on the bench. With just the one goal in it, there was everything to play for, and the match drew a crowd of 80,000 to the Estadio da Luz. Benfica were marginal favourites, but had an early scare when the Dutch referee, Charles Corver, disallowed a Vandenbergh ‘goal’ for offside. Humberto Coelho, taking every opportunity to venture upfield, volleyed a Diamantino cross into the side netting, and Benfica’s positive approach paid off in the 36th minute, when Chalana’s cross from the left was diverted to Han Sheu, who drove the ball high into the net. Overall equality had been restored – but not for long. Benfica relaxed, fatally, and three minutes later Anderlecht broke out of defence and a cross from Vercauteren was headed past Bento by Lozano, a Spanish-born midfielder who was seeking Belgian nationality. Premature celebration gave way to hushed foreboding in the packed stadium. Benfica were left needing to score twice to lift the trophy, and now Anderlecht’s decision to go in with an extra defender, Hugo Broos, and use Luka Peruzovic as a sweeper, paid dividends. Stromberg’s direct running from midfield, which had been a significant feature in the first half, was to no avail as his front men became enmeshed in the Belgians’ defensive web. Nene had a header saved from Carlos Manuel’s cross, and the introduction of the half-fit Filipovic was to no avail. He did manage to get the ball in the net, but from an offside position, and after successive European Cup wins in 1961 and 1962, Benfica had now lost their last four European finals.

At least domestic compensation was at hand. They won the league, by four points from Porto, and completed the double by beating the same opposition 1–0 in the Portuguese Cup Final. Two trophies and a European final in his first season – even directors who prided themselves in being the hardest of task masters were suitably impressed.

There was no runaway start to the 1983/84 season. Eriksson sold Alves, to Boavista, and signed Antonio Oliveira, a centre-half from Maritimo, to fill in for Humberto Coelho, who would need lengthy convalescence after a serious knee injury. This time Porto, spearheaded by the endlessly prolific Fernando Gomes, who had won the Golden Boot as the top scorer in Europe the previous season, with 36 goals, matched Benfica stride for stride. After their first seven league games, just two points covered the top three, with Benfica on 13, Porto 12 and Sporting Lisbon 11. After 13 matches, Sporting had dropped off the pace, but although Benfica had won 12 and drawn the other, Porto were still hanging in there, only two points behind. There would be no clean sweep of the honours board this time. Benfica were knocked out of the Portuguese Cup by Sporting and lost to Porto in the Super Cup.

Eriksson and his team had their eyes on a bigger prize – the European Cup. In the first two rounds, they made short work of Northern Ireland’s Linfield and Olympiakos of Greece. Then, on the eve of the quarter-final draw, Eriksson was asked who he would like to get, and who he wanted to avoid. ‘Ideally, I’d like Rapid Vienna,’ he said, ‘but I’d settle for anyone apart from Liverpool.’ Almost inevitably after that, Benfica drew Liverpool. ‘The worst possible opposition we could have got,’ was Eriksson’s reaction. ‘I rate them the best team in Europe, as they have been for the past decade. But we have to play them, there’s no escape, so play them we will, and we aren’t going to be afraid of their reputation or their ability. If we play well, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t beat anyone, even Liverpool. Other teams have done so. They lost last season to a Polish team, Widzew Lodz, and I know we are better than Lodz.’

Talking up the opposition was probably a mistake. The last thing the Benfica players needed was to be reminded of Liverpool’s strength. Stromberg explained: ‘It was a very difficult draw – all the more so because the Portuguese players had so much respect for English teams. They would rather have played Real Madrid or Barcelona – any of the south European sides – than a team from England or Germany. They were afraid of their physical football. Against Spanish opposition, the Portuguese always thought they could win, but not against the English or the Germans. That was a big problem in their heads.’

Nevertheless, Eriksson’s well-organized team defended assiduously at Anfield, where it was 0–0 at half-time, with Liverpool labouring to break them down. It took a substitution to do it, Joe Fagan replacing Craig Johnston with Kenny Dalglish, who had been out for eight weeks, and had played only two reserve games since fracturing a cheekbone. The class of ‘King Kenny’ was the vital difference in the second half, when Ian Rush headed home the only goal of the game from an Alan Kennedy cross. Fagan said: ‘It was a calculated risk playing Kenny at all, but it paid off. He gave us a little more skill and turned the game our way.’ Eriksson said: ‘Dalglish was brilliant. He is the same player, even after being away for two months. The away goal in Europe is very important, and I am disappointed we did not get one. It will not be easy for us in Lisbon now. Many teams play better at home than away, but not Liverpool.’

Prophetic stuff. Between the two legs, Liverpool signed John Wark from Ipswich, and the new arrival brought the best out of his rivals for a place, notably Ronnie Whelan and Craig Johnston. At the second time of asking, Liverpool were magnificent, although they were helped on their way by a maladroit piece of goalkeeping by Bento who, with nine minutes gone, allowed a header from Whelan to slip through his hands and then his legs. ‘We’d played well at Anfield, and really thought we had a chance at home,’ Stromberg said. ‘But then our goalkeeper made that bad mistake early on which meant we had to score three, and that was too much for us.’

After 34 minutes Liverpool made it 3–0 on aggregate, putting the tie well beyond Benfica’s recovery, when Dalglish exchanged passes with Rush and played in Johnston, who scored from the 18-yard line. Benfica had no option but to attack, and Eriksson sent on two attacking substitutes, Filipovic and Sheu. It was Nene, however, scorer in both legs against Liverpool in the same competition six years earlier, who reduced the deficit after 75 minutes, only for Rush to head in his 35th goal of the season and Whelan to make it 5–1 on aggregate in the dying seconds.

At least there was no hangover for Benfica. Instead they took out their disappointment on little Penafiel, who were thrashed 8–0 in the next league game. That weekend, it was announced that Eriksson had agreed a new two-year contract with the club.

Nene’s four goals against Penafiel was his third hat-trick in a month after scoring three against Braga (7–0) and another three at the expense of Farense (7–2). The 34 year old was to finish joint top scorer in the league with 21 goals, overshadowing his partner Filipovic, who was no longer a fixture in the side. A young Danish newcomer, Michael Manniche, was often preferred, and the Yugoslav didn’t like it. The situation came to a head before the league match at home to next-to-bottom Estoril, when Filipovic hoped to net a hatful, only to get word that Manniche was in again. Sounding off in the local press, Filipovic insisted he was the better player. ‘I have greater experience and technically I’m stronger,’ he said. ‘Also, his timing is often wrong when he challenges for the ball in the air. I understand that Glenn Stromberg has to play in midfield, and that it is between Manniche and myself for the other foreigner’s place, but I have scored six goals in six matches for us this season, and four of those have been the winner. So why does he play instead of me? I don’t understand it.

‘The coach wants us to play a much more modern style of football than Benfica are used to. Eriksson wants us to run off the ball, when in the past, in the Portuguese style, we tended to do all our running on the ball. Eriksson must think Manniche is better suited to this game, but to be honest, although we have been winning, we haven’t always been playing very well. I did well enough for Eriksson last season, scoring plenty of goals. He should give me a chance again.’

Eriksson’s reaction to this outburst was surprising. He played Filipovic against Estoril. What followed was just one of many instances that fuelled his reputation as a lucky manager. Benfica took the lead midway through the second half, with a Diamantino header, but Estoril equalized after 75 minutes. Then, with eight minutes left, Filipovic and the Estoril goalkeeper, Manuel Abrantes, went for a loose ball, Filipovic made his challenge fractionally late and was booked. No problem there, but he launched into a tirade against the referee, Antonio Ferreira, who sent him off. Eriksson had no more trouble from his erstwhile critic, who admitted he had blown his last chance. ‘It was my fault,’ he said, ‘but there was plenty of bad language from others out there, and I don’t see why he had to pick on me. For a comeback game, things couldn’t have gone worse.’

Benfica went on to win the league, for the 26th time, by four points from Sporting. The issue was decided on the penultimate day, when Chalana’s goal, in a 1–1 draw with Sporting, rendered the last set of results of arithmetical interest only.

Eriksson had verbally agreed a new contract, committing himself to the club for another two years, but the European Cup Final, between Liverpool and Roma, on 30 May found him in Rome. Nils Liedholm had indicated that he would be leaving Roma, and when Eriksson flew in for the match, the suspicions of the Italian media were aroused. He told an impromptu press conference: ‘I have a new, two-year contract with Benfica. That isn’t easily broken, you know. In fact, I haven’t even got a ticket for the game. Benfica applied for me, but we haven’t received a reply.’ Later, it transpired that Ann-Christin had been touring Rome, being shown luxury apartments, while her husband watched the final.

Eriksson now had had a change of heart, and told the Benfica president, a builder and property magnate named Fernando Martins, that he would be leaving, after all, for Roma. According to Eriksson, the president had agreed to sell Ricardo to Paris St Germain behind his back, which rendered their agreement null and void. ‘If you are going to sell my players without telling me, then I’ll go too,’ he said. Martins, furious, followed him to Italy to demand compensation from his new employers. Stromberg was surprised, ‘but only a little bit’, by his mentor’s decision to leave after all. ‘He had told me, one month before, that he was going to stay, but I could understand what he did. Benfica are a great club, they won the league every year, so they were always in the European Cup, but for a coach like Sven, Italy meant a lot more. Football in Portugal is very big, but there are only three clubs of any real size – Benfica, Sporting and Porto. The rest don’t mean much. Going to Italy, to train a team like Roma, was a dream for Sven. When I heard he was going, I went, too. To Atalanta.’

CHAPTER TEN ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME

Sven-Goran Eriksson could have come to England nearly 20 years earlier. In May 1984, Tottenham Hotspur were looking for a manager to replace Keith Burkinshaw, and the chairman, Irving Scholar, approached two candidates, one of whom was Eriksson. Scholar told me: ‘Sven was just about to leave Benfica. He said he’d had a meeting with the people at Roma, and that basically he’d shaken hands on a deal, although nothing had been completely finalized. His agent at the time was a nice chap called Borge Lantz, who lived in Portugal, at Cascaes. I approached him because Sven had come to my attention as being a young, bright European coach with a future. He’d been successful at Gothenburg, winning the UEFA Cup, and he’d done well at Benfica. I’d heard a whisper that he was ready to move on, and so I checked him out.

‘I’d just been let down by Alex Ferguson, and I do mean let down. We’d had a few meetings and a lot of conversations, and I’d said to him: “Look, when everything is sorted we’ll shake hands, and that’s it.” He said: “Oh yeah, I’m that type of bloke as well,” so that was fine. Or so I thought. Anyway, we had our last meeting in Paris. We’d agreed the contract, everything. All the “t”s were crossed, all the “i”s dotted, so I said: “Are you ready?” He said he was. We’d both made great play of this thing about the handshake. I put my hand out, we shook hands, and he said, “Right then, that’s it.” I thought “great”, but five or six weeks later I started to get the impression that he was going to let me down. It was when he did that I spoke to Lantz about Eriksson. He said: “Go ahead, have a word with him, here’s his number.” So I called Sven and he made it clear that he had given his word to Roma, but that if the move fell through he would be very interested in coming to England. He went to Roma, and the rest is history. It was a shame. It would have been interesting to have a foreign coach all that time ago. It has become the fashion now, but it would have been ground-breaking then. Nobody in England had heard of him in 1984. It was “Sven-Goran Eriksson, who’s he?” When I bumped into him in England just after his appointment, I reminded him of the Tottenham thing, and his face lit up. If only, eh?’

Having missed out on Eriksson and Ferguson, who stayed at Aberdeen for another two years before joining Manchester United, Spurs gave the job to Burkinshaw’s number two, Peter Shreeves, and it was another three years before Terry Venables became the European-orientated coach Scholar wanted. In March 2002, in reflective mood, he said: ‘My first two choices weren’t bad ones, were they – Alex Ferguson and Sven-Goran Eriksson. I wanted Ferguson because, like Eriksson, he’d been successful in Europe. He’d won the Cup-Winners’ Cup and blazed a trail in Europe with Aberdeen.’

On 8 May 1984, three weeks before the European Cup Final, the president of Roma, Dino Viola, agreed with Eriksson that he would replace his fellow Swede, Nils Liedholm, as coach. He was not the first choice for the job, getting it only after Giovanni Trapattoni, then at Juventus, had spurned Viola’s overtures, but however the chance came, this really was the big time. Italy’s Serie A was undoubtedly the strongest, most glamorous league in the world at the time, and Roma had won the coveted scudetto in 1983. In 1983/84 they won the Italian Cup, beating Verona in the final, and were runners-up in Serie A, two points behind Juventus, as well as losing only on penalties to Liverpool in the European Cup. Eriksson, then, inherited a fine team, which had two world-class Brazilians, Falcao and Cerezo, at its fulcrum, with the ‘golden boy’ of Italian football, Bruno Conti, who had just made his international debut, wide on the right. Other significant individuals included the goalkeeper, Franco Tancredi, who had played twice for Italy, left-back Aldo Maldera, who had 10 caps, midfielders Carlo Ancelotti and Giuseppe Giannini, both of whom were to have substantial international careers, and strikers Maurizio Iorio, Roberto Pruzzo and Francesco Graziani. Iorio, 25, had been the leading scorer in Serie A the previous season, while on loan to Verona, and was naturally recalled, while Pruzzo, 29, had been the league’s top scorer in 1980, and had scored a brilliant equalizer against Liverpool in the European Cup Final. He had six caps. The most celebrated of the front men was Graziani, 32, whose 64 appearances for Italy took in the 1978 and 1982 World Cups. Despite the talent in the team, however, Eriksson’s first season was thoroughly disappointing. Defensively orientated to a tedious degree, Roma averaged less than a goal a game (33 in 34) in finishing a poor seventh in the league, and got no further than the last eight of the Cup-Winners’ Cup, where they were eliminated by Bayern Munich, for whom Lothar Matthaus was at his peerless best.

In mitigation, Eriksson’s entry into the Machiavellian world of Italian football was by no means straightforward. For a start, he was handicapped by the rule prohibiting foreigners from managing at club level (Liedholm had taken out dual citizenship to overcome this). Roma sought to get around it by naming a coach, Roberto Clagluna, as their official ‘trainer’, with Eriksson taking the title of director of football, but this use of a ‘stooge’ created more problems than it solved.

On taking over, Eriksson immediately asserted his authority by banning smoking, amending the bonus system to stop the players being rewarded for drawing games and ending ‘retiro’, the practice whereby the team ‘retired’ to weekend training camps. This latter decision, he now admits, was a mistake. He explained: ‘I tried to put an end to the custom of meeting at a hotel before our Sunday matches. When we finished training one Saturday, I told the players: “See you at lunch tomorrow.” This caused astonishment, and in the end I had to reinstate the meetings. Ritual and habit can provide security.’

In August, Roma won a pre-season tournament in Coruna, Spain, where top-class opposition was provided by Manchester United, Athletic Bilbao and Vasco da Gama, of Brazil, and the week before the Serie A programme started, they defeated Lazio 2–0 in the Italian Cup. After that it was a surprise, as well as a disappointment, when they were ominously slow out of the traps, with four successive draws in the league and a run of eight games without a win. A month into the season, the Italian Football Federation rejected the coaching association’s complaint against the employment of Eriksson, in defiance of the ban on foreign coaches, and scrapped the prohibition altogether. Freed of all impediments, real or imaginary, he was able to immerse himself in his work, and Roma picked up nicely after their first victory, 2–1 at home to Fiorentina. That was the launching pad for an unbeaten ten-match sequence, yet it was to be a stop-start sort of season, and after 11 games in Serie A their modest return of 12 points had them only in fifth place, six behind the surprise leaders, Verona. They had their moments, thumping Cremonese 5–0 away, Di Carlo getting a hat-trick, but generally flattered only to deceive. Fairly typical was the struggle they had to overcome little Wrexham in the second round of the Cup-Winners’ Cup in November. A single goal, scored by Francesco Graziani in the home leg, was enough to see off Steaua Bucharest in the first round, after which Welsh opposition, from the Football League’s Fourth Division, was expected to provide easy pickings. Roma won 2–0 at home in the first leg, with goals from Pruzzo and Cerezo, in a match notable for the return of Carlo Ancelotti, the powerful Italian international midfield player, who had been out injured for 11 months. The aggregate margin, 3–0, was comfortable enough, but The Times reported the decisive second leg as follows: ‘Only disgraceful refereeing in the first leg, and a rush of blood to the head at the wrong moment in the second stood between Wrexham and an extraordinary overall victory. Cushioned as they were by two highly debatable goals in the first leg, it would be easy to say that Roma, runners-up in the European Cup only six months ago, did just enough to dispose of England’s [sic] 89th best team. But the truth is that they might easily have trooped from the field here a beaten team, had it not been for some hasty finishing and the magnificence of Falcao, the Brazilian, who covered an amazing amount of ground for someone supposedly unfit.’

Falcao had joined Roma from the Brazilian club Internacional for £950,000 in 1980, and was widely acclaimed as the best midfield player at the 1982 World Cup. Twice Brazil’s Footballer of the Year, he came third in the World Footballer of the Year poll, behind Paolo Rossi and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, in 1982. Extravagantly gifted and immensely experienced, the 30 year old was expected to be the cornerstone of Eriksson’s team, but he injured his knee in a goalless draw with Verona on 21 October and then the president, Viola, complained bitterly about his failure to play against Juventus in Turin the following week. Falcao was carrying two stitches in his knee, but Viola felt he was fit enough to play, and a war of words ensued. Viola said that Cerezo, not Falcao, was Roma’s key player, Falcao took umbrage and Eriksson was caught in the middle, very much the loser. Falcao suffered more knee trouble in a 0–0 stalemate, against Lazio, on 11 November, and the Brazilian’s continuing fitness problems undermined the team that season. A superstar, on a two-year contract worth £1.5m, and a living legend among the club’s supporters after his colossal contribution to the 1983 title win, he dated Ursula Andress while still living with his mum in a sumptuous villa in the fashionable Monte Mario part of the city, and was ferried to and from training (and everywhere else) in a chauffeur-driven BMW. Unfortunately for all concerned, he spent most of the 1984/85 season on various treatment tables, eventually undergoing surgery on his troublesome knee in the United States before a lengthy convalescence at home in Brazil.

His last game for Roma was away to Maradona’s Napoli on 16 December 1984. Typically, he marked his farewell with a goal, but after celebrating with his usual jump, he returned to earth awkwardly, and the smile froze on his lips. Five days later, he was on the operating table for more surgery on his knee. The whole team had been dependent upon Falcao to an unhealthy degree, Eriksson felt. ‘Due to his knee problem, he had only four matches with us during my time at the club, but in the games he played, Roma were a completely different team. He went around the pitch pointing and co-ordinating. When he wasn’t able to play, the others would come to me and say: “We can’t play without Falcao.” That season we came seventh in the league. The following year, with just about the same team, we came second and won the cup. But it took me a whole year to get the players to understand that we could play without Falcao. Without him, the players had a mental block. Falcao’s presence, or absence, was decisive in determining how the players felt, and this in turn determined how well they played.’

Searching for a contemporary comparison, Eriksson told me: ‘If he was playing today, Falcao would be another Patrick Vieira.’ When Falcao was unavailable, the Roma midfield was staffed by Cerezo, Ancelotti, Conti and Giannini, an elegant stalwart who was to make 318 appearances for the club between 1981 and 1996. For goals, Roma relied largely upon Pruzzo, the most prolific striker in the club’s history, who weighed in with a modest eight in 21 league games. That Giannini, with four, was the second-highest scorer says it all about Roma’s football that season. Graziani, a World Cup-winning striker with Italy two years earlier, managed only two in 19 matches.

By January they were moving up the table, after successive 1–0 wins against Torino and Avellino, but the crowd, and the critics, were not happy. The newspapers complained that Roma were playing in an unsophisticated ‘English’ style. Quite right too, after their defeat by Liverpool, countered Viola. He’d had enough of Liedholm’s ‘lateral football’.