Eriksson pursues sensible course of compromise

If nothing else, Sven Goran Eriksson proved yesterday that one man's crisis mode is in another scarcely a hint of a frown. "Sometimes," he said while slipping calmly into the second category, "it is important to look into the eyes of a player. You see the spirit he has."

Or perhaps, at the end of a week bedevilled by reports of bacchanalian excesses by some members of his England team, quite how much of it he has consumed.

On the eve of today's last World Cup qualifying group game with Greece at Old Trafford, the England coach found himself besieged by questions from the past, the kind which regularly fell on to the heads of such benighted predecessors as Kevin Keegan and Glenn Hoddle. Eriksson however, and perhaps not surprisingly, gave no sense of a man edging his back towards the wall. His players, he suggested just a little tartly, had passed the eye test and plainly none of them would be required to walk a straight line before changing into their work clothes today.

"Maybe we can talk about these things next week," said Eriksson, "but today I want to talk about only football, please. I can say that I don't think anyone has let England down, and that all the players are focused on the game with Greece."

This might have been said to have been the first day of the rest of Eriksson's managerial life in England, a day when he felt the heat of the tension which once drove another of his predecessors, Bobby Robson, into the wrong turning of a broom cupboard at Wembley, but the cool fan on the Swedish temperature control was working as efficiently as ever.

Again Eriksson proved that he was beyond the temptations of bait under questioning. He was invited to proclaim a truth that seemed self-evident when all the facts were examined, the one that said Steven Gerrard, Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman had showed questionable judgment in taking late, if unboisterous, drinks on the eve of joining England's party at the training headquarters near Manchester on Tuesday, but they had broken no specific rules. It was, interestingly, an invitation which held no appeal for the coach.

An inference hard to avoid was that if the actions of three of his players, and the resulting negative publicity, had fallen short of any need for official punishment, they had not exactly filled him with unalloyed pleasure. No doubt Eriksson will go over with the players his expectations of their behaviour when they are away from his direct control, but just as surely he is unlikely to order them into a wholesale rejection of the only kind of relaxation they have ever known. What he is plainly seeking is a degree of intelligent compromise and an acceptance that pressures on an England player, which from time-to-time may seem unrealistically harsh, are unlikely to go away.

In the meantime Eriksson exudes his now trademark belief in the value of consistent behaviour on and off the field. "I cannot change, I am over 50," he said, when asked about his ability to subdue his emotions until a moment of triumph or defeat.

He was not like Giovanni Trapattoni, the coach of Italy, who leaps up and kisses six or seven of his players when a goal is scored. Trapattoni, said Eriksson, made it worth the ticket just to watch him ride on the great roller-coaster of the game. For himself, emotion in both private and public life was something that you felt deeply but expressed in your own way. It would not be a question of specifically thanking his players at the end of an extraordinary run which has to date brought five straight wins which have so transformed England's World Cup prospects. "We should see victory over Greece tomorrow," he said, "as one very big step towards something very beautiful."

He shrugs away the selection dilemma brought by the absence of Michael Owen. Teddy Sheringham, Andy Cole, Emile Heskey and Fowler were all good strikers, so it meant that whatever the option you chose there was a very good chance that it would be successful. But there was no coyness either. Short of an official announcement, Eriksson could not have made more clear his choice of Fowler as Owen's replacement.

Fowler had passed both the eye test and the more critical one that assesses a player's potential to deliver in a game which Eriksson agreed was one of the most important, if not the most important, he had ever faced in a distinguished career. He said: "It is so important because the World Cup is so big, such a beautiful party; European finals are big, of course, but not as big as this. We have to remember this and we all have to understand that we are not yet in the World Cup. No, we are not there yet, absolutely not."

If they make it, Eriksson believes England can mature considerably in the six or seven months before the party begins. In fact the process may well have started in this last week. The eye test, you have to believe, is here to stay.

It is one that plainly goes beyond any vigilance applied to the social habits of talented young men like Gerrard and Fowler. It is about a sense of purpose and priorities. Eriksson, not for the first time, showed that his remain in perfect order.