Eriksson's misfits descend into chaos

A rather terrible question surfaced amid the shambles of England's wretched first step in the World Cup here last night.

It asked if Sven Goran Eriksson, the man of charm and urbanity, is in the highest football terms something of a myth. We know, of course, that he has a wonderful knack of side-stepping the kind of controversies that destroyed so many of his predecessors. We know he is intelligent enough not to embroil himself in arguments he cannot win. But that was not the requirement as a thoroughly ordinary, and tactically crude, Swedish team battered England to within an inch of what would have been a defeat wholly without scope for excuse or complaint.

What Eriksson needed to show after last night's 1-1 draw was the quick footwork and power of adjustment that can drive a disintegrating team into some kind of shape.

We are told that he had some harsh words at half-time after England had shown disconcerting signs that they were unable to build or even protect the lead that came when Sol Campbell rose powerfully to meet a David Beckham corner.

But did Eriksson's admonishments include any clear direction out of the growing crisis? If they did, they were far from apparent.

Instead we had the worrying evidence of a team shorn of an utterly basic ingredient of success. It was the ability to draw together at times of pressure, to counter losses of form and confidence with communal strength. In their opening statement, England had about as much sense of community as a rabble on the run. But at this level the running has to have a point. England's did not and when David Beckham left the field 17 minutes into the second half – "he was tired, not injured" said Eriksson – the team's descent into chaos was already full blown.

Beckham's appearance in this World Cup is a deepening mystery. If he was merely tired, why would he leave his England team at such a critical moment, but if he was injured, and despite Eriksson's statement he did seem to be exhibiting signs of a limp, what, you had to ask, could have possibly justified his selection? That, though, is a question that begs for a little more reflection. Here in a stadium built with special provision for the risk of earthquake, the biggest tremor was caused not by individual failures, though there were many, but that collective inability to fashion the beginnings of a respectable performance.

The sign of a good team is that it can play its way out of a poor performance. It can yank itself back to some good basic values. The sign of a bad team is that it goes in the opposite direction.

For Eriksson the challenge now is to come up with something a little more convincing, a little more unified in five days' time, when the questions will not be asked by a midfield comprising two Everton players, one of Danish club Brondby and a plainly unfit Fredrik Ljungberg. No, Argentina will present the craft of the "Little Witch", Juan Sebastian Veron, majestically liberated by his stepping out of the Manchester United vortex, and the guileful Ariel Ortega and their superb back-up, young Pablo Aimar. Before England fell apart publicly, Argentina beat Nigeria in a group game superior in so many ways it would be an unacceptable pain to count them.

Just let's say that Argentina, and the beaten but impressive Nigeria, produced football of a rhythm and a bite that would have been greeted as a wondrous, alien presence had it visited even briefly the labourings of England and Sweden.

Between the two matches was a class barrier of depressing dimension. Beckham was said to have done well in the first half, and it is true that he flung out two or three beautifully flighted passes. He also delivered perfectly the corner which Campbell dispatched so emphatically. But the powers of leadership with which he has been so extravagantly attributed, perhaps through no fault of his own, never began to touch the stacatto flow of a game which lacked grace and any competitive cohesion.

Sweden might have won 3-1, Teddy Lucic failing to win a one-on-one duel with David Seaman after being put away by a brilliant ball from Ljungberg, by some distance the most incisive move of the match, and Tobias Linderoth blazing over with the English defence scattered.

The goal Sweden scored through Niclas Alexandersson, who has had his struggles holding down a place in the Everton first team, had to be placed, with grim predictability, at the door of Danny Mills. That the Leeds player has a certain boldness going forward, though one not often adorned by precise execution, cannot be denied, but then nor can his manifest inability to produce the defensive technique required at international level. Whether Eriksson can continue to ignore this glaring truth is not the least intriguing aspect of his selection of the team to meet Argentina in Sapporo on Friday. When Mills addressed the ball at that critical moment he had a classic defender's choice. He could head or volley it to safety. Instead he did something outside of the trained defender's canon. He chested it downwards, and when he scuffled to control it under pressure, he could only play it to Alexandersson's feet.

Sweden were emboldened by this gift, but not to the extent that they were any more inclined to play the kind of craftsmanlike football which distinguished so many of their predecessors – and which had helped to deny England a victory over them since 1968. They merely applied more pressure, more long balls, and England's response was pitiful. They too humped it forward, a tactic which only compounded Michael Owen's own problems of touch and confidence. Owen Hargreaves started brightly in his solid, educated way but by the second half he too had been sucked into the confusion which welled all around him. It meant that of individual reputations only those of Seaman and Paul Scholes survived without any kind of damage.

Scholes left the field stony faced, which he tends to do anyway, but on this occasion there was also an impression of absolute exasperation, He had toiled hard and with the look of a proper footballer.

Maybe Eriksson will redeem a grim situation. Perhaps he will give, at the latest of hours, a new gift of belief and understanding. After his brilliant reclamation of the qualifying task, he no doubt has earned a little patience. But he, the sophisticated football man, has always known that what happens here in Japan will be the most important test of his work, and those of us who have found no hardship in saluting his style have known it too. For the moment, though, the provisional verdict has to be harsh. Honesty insists on the point that if the savagely criticised Graham Taylor, Glenn Hoddle or Kevin Keegan had been the author of last night's performance the critical dogs would have been yelping for blood.

Eriksson gave an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders and said, "It was the first game, it wasn't a win and it wasn't a loss. Now we must go forward with faith." That, certainly, but also quite a lot more if a place in the second round is to be anything more than a foolish dream. The priority, and it is one that screams out, is for England to begin to work together. Or, to put it another way, look something more than a gang of misfits thrown together on your local park.