As Sven-Goran Eriksson is diagnosed with terminal cancer, OLIVER HOLT pays tribute to a man whose grace overcame all football threw at him

Harbingers of woe and doom came often for Sven Goran Eriksson in the years at the start of this century when he managed the England men’s team.

They came to him with prophecies of his demise because of a romantic liaison, a quarter-final defeat or a feeling he was not worthy of managing England’s vainglorious Golden Generation.

He always stayed level, calm and kind. I never saw him angry. Always, he bade those impostors and inquisitors good day with uncommon grace and, always, they left as the losers, victims of his unflappable urbanity.

Even at the end of his time in charge after the 2006 World Cup, he pleaded with the media not to ‘kill’ Wayne Rooney, who had been sent off in the last eight loss to Portugal.

And so it was on Thursday when Eriksson, 75, revealed he had terminal cancer and, perhaps, less than a year to live. He did not waste any time on anger, resentment or regret. He bade cancer good day and said he would get on with his life.

‘I’m going to resist as long as I can,’ he said. ‘When you get a message like that, you appreciate every day and are happy when you wake up in the morning and you feel OK, so that’s what I’m doing.’ If anyone can keep cancer at bay for a while with kindness and equanimity, it will be Sven.

His kindness, grace and class will be his epitaph as much as all he achieved in football, but his place in this country’s sporting history rests largely on the fact that when the FA appointed him as successor to Kevin Keegan at the start of 2001, he became the first foreign manager to take charge of the England team.

In just shy of six years in charge, Eriksson became an unlikely standard-bearer for football’s emerging celebrity culture. He was there at the birth of the cult of the WAGs in Baden-Baden in 2006, when the world paid as much attention to Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole and Coleen Rooney as it did to their other halves.

He was entrusted with satisfying the whims and demands of the so-called Baby Bentley Brigade, at a time when the balance of power in the game was shifting away from international football towards clubs and away from managers towards players empowered by rocketing wage inflation.

Eriksson tried and failed to turn England’s feted crop of footballers into players whose achievements matched their fame.

By the time he departed in 2006, he had been turned into a scapegoat. He was the foreign boss we blamed for England’s faults. He was entrusted with the greatest crop of English talent since 1970 and blew it.

That was the narrative, anyway. There was some legitimacy in the criticism of his conservative management, but like those before and after him, he was a victim of inflated expectations and a peculiarly English sense of entitlement, which even now seeks to damn one of his heirs, Gareth Southgate, just as it damned him.

When Eriksson attended his first FA press conference in January 2001, a former policeman dressed himself up as John Bull and stood outside the FA’s headquarters in Soho Square to barrack him and protest about the appointment of England’s first foreign coach. He bore a lollipop stick with the words ‘No Surrender’ written on it.

Eriksson had won Serie A with Lazio, but the idea of a Swede managing England was a novelty then and he was regarded, initially at least, with scepticism. I asked him at that press conference if he could name Sunderland’s left back. He could not. It was a cheap shot and I regretted asking it later. The answer, for the record, was Michael Gray.

Eriksson adopted a long-suffering air that was somewhere between bemusement and amusement at the barbs that were aimed at him and he won many of his critics over with his relentless decency and the restoration of order to an England side that had dissolved into chaos under Keegan. Keegan was more John Bull’s type.

Eriksson seemed habitually and wryly bewildered by the ferocity of English ambition, but nine months after his appointment he led the Three Lions to a remarkable 5-1 victory over Germany in Munich in a World Cup qualifying tie.

Another colleague, who had been an Eriksson critic, lit two cigars in the press box when Emile Heskey scored England’s fifth goal and put them in opposite corners of his mouth, puffing on them at the same time.

‘After the Germany game, I didn’t hear anything about being a foreign manager of England, not for a while anyway,’ Eriksson said.

For a generation of England fans, who had been brought up on heart-breaking penalty shootout defeats by West Germany and Germany in 1990 and 1996, it felt like a glorious departure and a signal of great things to come. It never quite worked out like that.

England qualified for the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea on an emotional afternoon at Old Trafford, when David Beckham scored a stunning last-minute free-kick against Greece.

But even though Eriksson had an enviable array of talent at his disposal — Ashley Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Sol Campbell, Gary Neville, Steven Gerrard, Paul Scholes, Frank Lampard, Beckham, Michael Owen and, later, Rooney — he never quite seemed able to deploy it to maximum effect.

The build-up to that tournament, probably our best shot at winning the World Cup since 1966, was dominated by the melodrama over whether Beckham would recover in time from a broken metatarsal to take part and, not for the last time, it felt as if Eriksson was an extra in a celebrity soap opera. Too often it seemed he was a passenger, not the driver.

Beckham played in 2002, even though it was clear he was not fully fit, but England performed creditably enough and reached the quarter-finals, their best World Cup performance since 1990, where they lost to a Brazil team that featured a frontline of three Ballon d’Or winners, Ronaldo, Rivaldo and Ronaldinho.

Eriksson was dogged, in particular, by the repeated accusation that he was failing to get the best out a midfield that boasted Scholes, Lampard, Gerrard and Beckham. It was felt he lacked the ruthlessness to drop one of them for the sake of a better-balanced side. Scholes was often pushed out to the left. It was a fudge that did not work.

The manager was also a victim of bad luck. He acted boldly by giving Rooney his debut as an 18-year-old and the Everton forward took Euro 2004 by storm. Many felt England were going to win the tournament, but Rooney broke his metatarsal in the quarter-final against Portugal and England lost, again, on penalties.

It was hard to avoid the impression that Eriksson was in thrall to celebrity. He indulged it. He became the father of WAG culture when he allowed the players’ wives and girlfriends to travel to the 2006 World Cup and stay at a hotel — Brenner’s Park — in Baden-Baden, not far from the squad’s base.

England’s tournament became a travelling circus that appalled some of the more retiring players and created a media frenzy.

Eriksson had been the victim of a newspaper sting a few months before the tournament when he was tricked into several embarrassing disclosures by the Fake Sheik, an undercover reporter for the News of the World. By then, he had become a showbiz story, too, after it emerged he had a liaison with the television presenter, Ulrika Jonsson, and an affair with an FA employee, Faria Alam, who had also had a relationship with the then FA chief executive, Mark Palios.

In Baden-Baden, Eriksson’s flamboyant partner, Nancy dell’Olio, organised several parties for the players’ partners.

Much was expected of England in 2006. It was the Golden Generation’s last stand and, increasingly, there was a feeling that their talent had been wasted.

Perhaps it was easier to blame Eriksson than footballers adored by millions. He had become a ‘foreign coach’ again.

I was a supporter of him though, in the face of some of the attacks aimed his way, and 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.

To the fury of Sir Alex Ferguson, Eriksson insisted on taking Rooney to the tournament in Germany, even though he had not recovered properly from a metatarsal injury. Eriksson spoke wryly of a volcanic conversation with the Manchester United manager when it became clear Rooney would play at the tournament.

He did not divulge the details of the conversation, of course, but he allowed himself to smile about the eruptions he heard at the other end of the line. Rooney was a shadow of himself and England limped through the tournament until they lost in the quarter-finals, again, against Portugal, again.

Rooney, infuriated by the limitations imposed on him by his lack of fitness, was sent off for stamping on Ricardo Carvalho during the match, prompting Cristiano Ronaldo, notoriously, to wink at the Portugal bench. It was typical of Eriksson that he used his farewell press conference as England manager to plead for clemency for the forward, who would go on to be the country’s record goalscorer.

‘You, more than me, need Wayne Rooney in the next few years,’ Eriksson said, ‘so, please, pay attention, don’t kill him, I beg you.’

He led a peripatetic coaching existence after leaving his job with England and after a stint at Manchester City, worked in Mexico, Ivory Coast, Thailand, Dubai, China and the Philippines before returning to Sweden.

In recent years, he has given a series of thoughtful, affectionate interviews to British journalists who travelled out to his home in Sweden to see him.

Always gracious, always charming, he is a man who has lived without bitterness.

He is a landmark in our football history, our first foreign England manager, the custodian of the doomed Golden Generation, a man whose lessons in grace overcame everything that his life in football threw at him.

All those who know him or have ever crossed paths with him, or have admired him from afar, will hope fervently that the time he has left is filled with joy and happiness.