Eriksson's gift of pressure management

Coach's qualities of humility and dignity will serve England well as tournament begins in earnest

There are two Sven Goran Erikssons but one of them didn't really exist and he has to be put away, as you might discard an illusion of youth. Much though some of us wanted to see him differently, certain truths have to be acknowledged as our hero in the rimless specs takes up his battle post here in the Far East.

The first of them is that he is not quite the cool Nordic aesthete who can detach himself from the forces of controversy which so diminished and finally consumed so many of his predecessors. His powers of common sense are not, after all, unlimited, no more than his ability to easily translate the sophistications of European football for players brought up in a much less refined form of the game.

Plainly there is not that much of the teacher about him despite his schoolmasterly demeanour. On the training field his interventions in the work of his chief coach, Steve McClaren, are rare. Some players have privately reported a disappointment that he does not get more involved in the day-to-day mechanics of fashioning a team in his own image.

Even those unenthusiastic about Steve McManaman's contribution to the England team since his richly promising work under Terry Venables in Euro '96 consider his exclusion from the squad here odd, even perverse, especially after his latest telling contribution to a European Cup win for Real Madrid. Spanish observers are aghast. "What passes between Eriksson and McManaman," one asked this week. "A big mystery, no?" Yes, but there have been no explanations from the Ice Man.

But then how refrigerated is the nerve of Eriksson after the decimation of his team, the loss of Steven Gerrard and Gary Neville and the likelihood that David Beckham, seven weeks without match football, can bring more than a token presence to his leadership of the team? The look of strain which came with the hysterical reaction to his fling with television celebrity girl Ulrika Jonsson – and growlings about the level of commercial exploitation of his job he was apparently cheerfully prepared to accept – has not noticeably lessened these last few days.

Recently the Sun's front page reported that Eriksson's love life was a "war zone". But now he is on the real battleground, the one upon which was always going to be finally judged, how does he stack up as a man able to shape the action and the mood of his men?

Pretty well, it has to be said.

Some of us put aside, with some considerable reluctance, our belief that Venables was perfectly capable of repeating the excellent job he did in his first stint as England manager – and recognised Eriksson as a man of distinguished achievement utterly undeserving of the jingoistic ravings of some of his English critics. But if we have been disappointed in some aspects of the unfolding story, that is almost certainly our problem. Eriksson didn't asked to be written up as the fountain-head of all wisdom and style.

No doubt some views of the Ice Man were too heavily idealised. His victories and his insights were leaped upon and carried on to a level where, all recent evidence suggests, they did not belong.

However, on the eve of battle, the pluses of Eriksson remain heavily in the ascendant.

Consider the baggage Glenn Hoddle took to France as England coach four years ago. He was open in his belief that a faith healer was an integral part of England's World Cup strategy, later saying that he considered not taking her with the squad was his biggest mistake. He said that Michael Owen, already earning rave notices across Europe, was not a natural goalscorer and he didn't start him until the third group game when England were fortunate to face a Colombia team palpably in an advanced state of decay. He said that Beckham's head was not in the right place, which was a worry to think but utterly disastrous to say to the nation. He had a tell-all World Cup diary in the works.

Perhaps in this light, we really ought to forgive Eriksson his injudicious amours and his liking, scarcely unique in and out of English football, for a quick quid.

The McManaman matter is rather more troubling but Eriksson has the right to his own instincts and if Sir Alf Ramsey could turn his back on the sublimely gifted striker Jimmy Greaves, his successor may be forgiven a prejudice against the attitudes McManaman has presented to him in their brief and now obviously terminated relationship.

In all such debates there is one factor which will always remain paramount. If Ramsey's men had failed, if a Russian linesman had taken a fractionally different view, history would have been infinitely less kind to a man who in three years magnificently rebuilt England's shambolic international game. Such expectation of Eriksson would be wholly unrealistic, even without the sickening blows of Gerrard's absence and Beckham's desperate fitness crisis.

Judgements will be made soon enough, however, and it would be naïve to believe they will be conditioned by anything other than England's results over the next few days, and, it is hoped, weeks.

But then something can still be said before the first shots are fired. Eriksson may not be all that he was painted so glowingly when he came into what the Football Association had officially announced as a dead zone of English football leadership, but what he has brought will surely survive disappointment in this World Cup.

He has brought a little rationality in selection and tactics. He hasn't imposed his ego. With the exception of McManaman, no English player at home can now seriously question the coach's judgement. He handled his greatest moment, the destruction of Germany in Munich, with magnificent aplomb and humility. He is a man of intelligence and inherent dignity. When you think of the recent history of England before his arrival, his basic cleverness – and his class – surely constitutes a hell of a start.