Eriksson’s England era became a celebrity circus – but he wanted to enjoy life and was never bitter

Published

8 months ago

August 26, 2024

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Sven-Göran Eriksson doubted so much whether England could ever have a foreign manager that he considered an initial approach a joke.

Intrigued eventually by the ground-breaking opportunity, rather than being deterred by the indignation, the Swede would launch the Three Lions into five of the most frenzied years in their history.

Everything belied his suave demeanour – from allowing a celebrity culture to consume the team to being an unlikely headline-making lothario himself and, even, showing passion while delivering results for his adopted country.

It was a blessing and burden to inherit a Golden Generation of talent of David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and co – captivating the country with dazzling one-off displays but unable to deliver when it mattered most under the weight of expectation and pressure.

It is the failure to overcome the constant quarter-final barrier and lift a trophy that shaped Eriksson’s England legacy where football too often seemed secondary.

But the Eriksson era did provide a mirror to the nation at the start of the new millennium.

How the public’s ravenous appetite to gaze into the private lives of the stars – and the legalities of intrusive tabloid reporting – was stretched to extremes, and only unearthed years later.

How patriotism could seem parochial or xenophobic – just as the Premier League was the platform for England opening up to the world.

For a coach arriving after league and cup wins with Lazio, it proved perplexing that his suitability focused on his nationality over coaching credentials.

“We’ve sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness.”

The Daily Mail headline set the tone for his introductory news conference.

He did try to sing God Save The Queen, feeling emotional as he realised the national standing he quickly assumed from 2001.

And doubters – some at least – were won over spectacularly on the turf of England’s greatest rival.

A 5-1 humiliation of Germany in Munich was followed a month later by another iconic moment of Eriksson’s reign – Beckham’s free kick that sealed a spot at the 2002 World Cup.

But the highs came in qualifying, falling short – always at the quarter-finals stage – in his three tournaments.

Too often it seemed more about fame than football around this England generation.

The high – or low – point of that came at his second and final World Cup in 2006.

As if managing Beckham, Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard wasn’t challenging enough, this was the era of the WAGs.

The celebrity circus around the Baden-Baden team base in Germany saw the players’ wives and girlfriends indulging in the media attention.

The insatiable appetite for a trophy matched the front page fodder the team – and their manager – provided.

Eriksson wanted to enjoy life but his privacy was exploited by the dark arts of tabloids.

Intimate details of affairs that the papers had a role in playing matchmaker to.

“I met Ulrika Jonsson on 8 December 2001, at some party hosted by the Daily Express, or maybe it was the Daily Star,” he recalled.

“The FA wanted me to travel around to various newspapers to be courteous and meet the editors. I visited the News Of The World too.”

It was the paper – closed in scandal by Rupert Murdoch in 2011 – he would blame for ending his England reign.

The notorious ‘fake sheikh’ had been used to trap him in a fictitious approach by Aston Villa ahead of the 2006 World Cup.

“I was extremely disappointed because I was sacked because of that,” Eriksson said. “I never accepted or understood that the News Of The World is so important… because I told the people at the FA – you believe in them or me.”

Who he could believe and trust was called into question by what he only later discovered was phone hacking.

Voicemail interceptions were linked to being behind the Daily Mirror’s revelation of his relationship with TV presenter Jonsson – another Swede who made it big in Britain.

“I think the football media was rather good. Sometimes they tried to kill me,” he said. “The other part of the media, that was a little bit of a surprise for me, because I wasn’t used to that.”

But he was never bitter – returning to English football to manage Manchester City just before the influx of Abu Dhabi wealth, dropping into the fourth division during a bizarre, brief spell as Notts County’s director of football and taking on a second-tier job at Leicester.

The breadth of managerial roles after England – at three Chinese clubs, and the Mexico, Ivory Coast and Philippines national teams – showed Eriksson was happiest in the dugout.

“As a player I was not good at all,” he recalled. “I was not good enough to play first division in Sweden well, so the best decision I ever took in my professional career was when Tord Grip came to me and said, ‘It’s better you stop playing and be my assistant coach.’

“And that was when I was 27. So I had much better luck as a coach than a player for sure.”

The affection following Eriksson revealing his cancer diagnosis in January 2024 even allowed an emotional farewell to English football at Anfield by fulfilling a wish to manage Liverpool, as revealed on Sky News.

And assessments of his England reign seem more dispassionate as the trophy drought has gone on.

His immediate successor – Steve McClaren – didn’t qualify for Euro 2008 – and it took 12 years for an England men’s manager to win a knockout game.

But in his dying days, Eriksson was still thinking back to the 2006 World Cup.

“We should have done better,” he said. “So the criticism I and the team took after that tournament I think was fair.”

But what he could still never accept was why some questioned his right to ever have the job.

And while breaking new ground by becoming England’s first foreign manager, the nationality debate endures whenever an FA appointment is needed.

“There were people who did not like I was not English,” he lamented in retirement.

World

Prisons across France attacked ‘in response to crackdown on drug trafficking’

Published

54 mins ago

April 15, 2025

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Prisons across France attacked 'in response to crackdown on drug trafficking'

Several French prisons were attacked overnight in response to government efforts to clamp down on drug trafficking in the country, senior officials said.

Unknown assailants fired automatic weapons at a prison in the southern city of Toulon, while vehicles were burned outside other facilities across the country and staff were threatened.

France’s national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday that it had taken charge of the investigation, while the country’s DGSI national security investigation will also be involved.

French media reported that the prisons targeted were in or near cities including Toulon, Aix-En-Provence, Marseille, and the communes of Valence and Nimes.

Prisons were also targeted in the commune of Villepinte and the suburb of Nanterre near Paris, according to reports.

It is not immediately clear whether the attacks were co-ordinated, or who carried them out.

France’s Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin, who has led efforts to toughen prison security and crack down on gangsters who run their empires from behind bars, said he would travel to Toulon.

“Attempts have been made to intimidate staff in several prisons, ranging from burning vehicles to firing automatic weapons,” Mr Darmanin wrote on X.

“I am going to Toulon to support the officers concerned. The French Republic is facing up to the problem of drug trafficking and is taking measures that will massively disrupt the criminal networks.”

Meanwhile, the country’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said he had instructed local prefects, alongside the police and gendarmerie, to immediately step up the protection of staff and prisons.

A ‘white tsunami’ of cocaine

Years of record South American cocaine imports to Europe have supercharged local drug markets, sparking a wave of drug violence across the continent.

Gangs in France have been able to expand from traditional power bases in cities like Marseille into smaller regional towns unaccustomed to drug violence.

The rise in gang crime is thought to have led to increased support for the far-right National Rally party and have helped drag French politics rightward.

Mr Darmanin, a former interior minister, and Mr Retailleau have prioritised tackling drug trafficking.

In February, Mr Retailleau announced record cocaine seizures of 47 tonnes in the first 11 months of 2024 compared to 23 tonnes in all of 2023.

Mr Retailleau said France had been hit by a “white tsunami” that had rewritten the rules of the criminal landscape.

Meanwhile, Mr Darmanin has proposed a series of measures to tighten prison security, including isolating the country’s top 100 kingpins.

Lawmakers are also close to approving a sweeping new anti-drug trafficking law that would create a new national organised crime prosecutors’ office and give greater investigative power to police investigating drug gangs.

French authorities scored a win against drug crime in February, when they recaptured Mohamed Amra, a French fugitive known as “The Fly.”

His escape as he was being transported from prison to a court hearing resulted in the deaths of two prison guards and was seized upon by right-wing politicians as evidence that France had lost its grip on drug crime.

World

Katy Perry floats in space as part of star-studded all-female Blue Origin mission

Published

19 hours ago

April 14, 2025

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Katy Perry floats in space as part of star-studded all-female Blue Origin mission

Katy Perry has blasted off to space along with five other women in the first all-female space crew in over sixty years.

The Firework singer lifted off from West Texas on a Blue Origin rocket before becoming the first artist to sing in space.

Flying alongside Perry were author Lauren Sanchez, the fiancee of Blue Origin owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, journalist and TV presenter Gayle King, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, former rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, and filmmaker Kerianne Flynn.

The star-studded crew were supported on the ground by family and friends including Kris Jenner, Khloe Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey, who said she had “never been more proud” of her friend, King.

“There’s only one time all the women are going up for the first time,” Oprah said she told her friend when urging her to go on the flight, telling her she’d regret turning down the opportunity.

Weightlessness

The crew were weightless for just four minutes after passing the Karman line, a 62-mile-high boundary that is internationally recognised as the boundary of space.

They could be heard screaming as they began to feel weightless, and told each other to look at the incredible views of the moon.

As the crew were leaving space, Perry started to sing What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong.

Asked why she chose that song, she said: “It’s not about me or about me singing my songs, it was about a collective energy in there.

“It’s about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it.”

She confirmed she will be writing a song about the experience.

Space missions don’t get any weirder than this

A sassy crew, a billionaire and a celebrity circus in the desert. Space missions don’t get any weirder.

But this is the new world of Blue Origin and its publicity machine.

It brought together six women – all at the top of their game – and dressed them in designer flight suits. One of them, singer Katy Perry, said they “put the ass into astronauts”.

They launched in a rocket called New Shepard, rising to 65 miles above the Earth, where they unbuckled and floated.

Back on planet Earth there was a star-studded gathering. There were a couple of Kardashians. And Oprah Winfrey was there too, covering her eyes, barely able to look.

It was all a little surreal, and maybe it will have attracted an audience who wouldn’t normally watch a space launch.

It’s remarkable that this was the first all-female space mission in more than 60 years.

Read Thomas Moore’s full analysis here.

The descent

Three parachutes on their capsule opened up to bring them safely back down to Earth and just before they landed, an air cushion blew a cloud of dust up in the west Texas desert, giving a dramatic-looking touchdown.

“Excited as I am, I’ll be very glad when we come back down,” said self-confessed nervous flier King before liftoff.

When she exited the shuttle, the presenter kissed the floor and said: “Thank you, Jesus”.

She said it was “oddly quiet” in space, and it reminded her that people needed to “do better and be better” on Earth.

“It was the most incredible experience of my life to be up there and see such vast darkness in space and look down on our planet,” said Flynn, through tears.

“The moon was so beautiful and I feel like that was a special gift just for me,” she said.

World

British father and son drown off Australian coast – reports

Published

19 hours ago

April 14, 2025

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British father and son drown off Australian coast - reports

A British father and son have reportedly drowned after they were swept out to sea off the coast of a popular Australian tourist town.

The 46-year-old man and his 17-year-old son reportedly got into difficulty while swimming at a beach in Seventeen Seventy – named after the year Captain James Cook landed in Queensland.

They were declared dead at the scene after being pulled from the water by a rescue helicopter.

A third man, an Australian who is believed to have tried to rescue the pair, was taken to hospital after suffering head injuries, according to local media.

CapRescue, the emergency service that conducted the operation on Sunday, said it “was a difficult one”.

“At 2.17pm, emergency services were called to 1770 after reports three people had been swept out into the ocean,” they said in a statement on Facebook.

“Multiple crews were tasked to the scene, including CapRescue. Despite the best efforts of all involved, two people tragically lost their lives.

“One patient was transported by air to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital in a life-threatening condition.

“Our thoughts are with everyone affected by this heartbreaking incident.”

Police confirmed the pair were visiting from the UK and said a report would be prepared for the coroner, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), while 7News reported they were father and son.

The town, at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, draws visitors from around the world and is busy with tourists in the school holidays before Easter.

Surf Life Saving Queensland’s regional operations manager, Darren Everard, told ABC the deaths were “an absolute tragedy”.

“Around any of our creeks and headlands… especially on a high tide when there’s a big swell, it’s chaos in the water and… sadly, that’s where we have coastal fatalities in Australia,” he said.

“I think everyone should just take that little bit of time when they go on holidays, and it doesn’t matter where you are around Australia, seek local knowledge… but you also need to go to where those flags are.”

A foreign Office spokesperson said: “We are supporting the family of two British nationals who have died in Australia and are in contact with the local authorities.”