Swede Dreams In The Shadow Of McClaren’s Exit

Of course it was all going to end in tears. Was there another option? Until yesterday, perhaps we thought so – after all, if there’s one thing that defines the England fan – and in truth, the English club fan – it’s eternal optimism.

As we watch the defining example of tea boy promoted to managing director slink off with his stunning compensation for a job badly done, the drums start to beat again, pounding out the same old messages. The waste of a so-called golden generation. The conceit that all we need is the right man, and fate will do the rest. The mantra that only incompetent choices by men in grey suits keep us away from the pinnacle of world football, where we so clearly belong.

The British press, for so long our international team’s number one curse, crank up the cycle again, so it can turn from effusive welcome through uneasy truce to unhappy co-existence to burying Caesar all over again. The weight of expectation is a living thing with 1966 eternally emblazoned on its forehead like the mark of the beast. And some sap – not poor sap, with the money involved – but sap nonetheless – will carry that weight, will fuel our unrealistic hopes until another winter of discontent snuffs them out again.

We had the man. He was called Sven-Goran Eriksson. Yes, it’s time someone said it.

Sven-Goran Eriksson, who turned around a disastrous World Cup qualifying campaign in 2002 and after that made qualifying campaigns a breeze, who took England to three quarter finals in sequence in major tournaments, whose record in competitive matches is quite excellent. But Sven was a grey man (his love life aside), and he wasn’t English. Those two things alone set him against the most powerful men in football – by which I mean those whose words muddy the back pages of the Daily Mirror, the Sun and the News Of The World.

Probably no individual who was not guilty of a horrendous crime has ever been so victimised by the red tops – fake sheikhs, kiss and tells, business stings – no limbo bar was too low for the sad little journos to squeeze under.

And ultimately, even Eriksson – urbane, at peace with his talent, building impressively into and out of the other side of Euro 2004 – seemed to be affected by the vitriol. Mud sticks, of course, and there’s no smoke without fire, of course – and for most people, although we’d all deny it, the newspapers influence our thinking. For Eriksson, too, although I’m sure he’d deny it, the pressure started to tell, and some of his decisions (Walcott springs to mind) indicated a snapping of logic.

In the final analysis, Manchester City gain a club manager of pretty much matchless pedigree, and England lost a builder, when it’s very much a builder that our national team always needs.

So farewell then, Steve McClaren, a pale shadow of your predecessor, but very much, unless we can curb the boom to bust mentality and the xenophobia which shames our national sports press, a high watermark for the years to come.

We don’t have a golden generation, you see. We have a group of decent enough players, hyped out of all proportion to their abilities, who need a Scolari or a Mourinho to show them that there’s no “I” in “team”, that success is an earned thing not a right and that celebrity is best viewed as a state of mind. On this last, the redtops would no doubt differ.

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