Swedes must find defiance in tough test of character

Friday afternoon in Kobe, 375 miles west of Tokyo – a good couple of hours on the bullet train – and the Swedes are sitting pretty. At the final whistle after a fortunate 2-1 victory over Nigeria, coaches and substitutes race on to the pitch and a tired team stagger over to celebrate with yellow-shirted supporters, whose ranks have been swollen for the day by Irish fans cheering Celtic's Henrik Larsson. Four points from two games in the World Cup's most demanding group are in the bag and the second round is beckoning.

Larsson, with a smart equalising goal and then a penalty he has earned himself, is man of the match and hero of the hour. Well used to being on the winning side after five seasons at Parkhead, he has absorbed the British habit of taking nothing for granted, but cannot help exuding the air of a job well done: "We had a bit of luck but over the whole game I think we deserved to win. We've played well despite losing a goal early in both games."

Lars Lagerback, in the unusual position for international football of being a co-coach, with Tommy Soderberg, is equally pleased with life: "We have players with very, very good character. They really are a team, who also enjoy being with each other outside the pitch."

Then it is off to the team hotel for a meal and the chance, as Lagerback puts it, "to relax watching the other match". But throw forward a few hours, and how relaxing can it have been? England have pulled off the worst possible result for the Swedes, who now realise they will be facing an Argentina side playing for their lives in Miyagi on Wednesday. Meanwhile England, inferior to Sweden only on goals scored, can take on a Nigerian side whom the Scandinavians themselves have demoralised by eliminating from contention.

Suddenly the mood has to become one of defiance for a game they must not lose, renewing self-belief in their reputation as a team who may be dull but are at all times difficult to beat. How difficult, though? Not so very much when the lightweight Nigerians, with two mere boys in attack, have broken through so often. Without their Barcelona stopper Patrik Andersson, who has been injured since February, Sweden's defence is not what it was. In the qualifying group, when Andersson started every one of the 10 matches, only three goals were conceded; it was a difficult statistic to believe in Kobe as Coventry's goalkeeper Magnus Hedman watched the ball being scraped off his line and bouncing back off the posts. He will certainly not have wanted to watch any replays of Nigeria's goal, when he got nowhere near a right-wing cross that Mjallby appeared to have left for him to collect.

Sweden's cunning plan to bewilder the opposition is clearly to have three players called Svensson in their squad. When Anders of Southampton starts, as he did on Friday, they field an all-Premiership midfield, full of hard running but short on the flair that Freddie Ljungberg has in abundance for Arsenal but has not yet carried over internationally.

In attack, Larsson is, of course, a danger, but it is not clear whether his partner Marcus Allback, who has just signed for Aston Villa (making eight players in the starting XI from English and Scottish clubs) is a straight replacement as target man for the lanky Kennet Andersson or not. "It all counts for nothing if we don't get a good result in the last game," said Larsson. That was one of the more sober assessments on what became an unexpectedly sobering day for Sweden.