The game finished 1-1 and Sweden extended an unbeaten record against England to 34 years, going on to qualify for the next round of the tournament in first place in the group. Adjust the clock four years, and Sweden are obliged to triumph on Tuesday to leapfrog the team managed by a compatriot. As for the unbeaten record, Sweden have more than an academic interest in maintaining it. Defeat would leave their chances of progress at the mercy of Trinidad & Tobago’s result against Paraguay.
Sweden must trust familiar personnel to achieve it. They have come to Germany with the likes of Alexandersson and Svensson in their squad, and another seven players with Premiership entries on their CVs, and the opportunity in Cologne to share reminiscence with old colleagues. Tobias Linderoth is still shuttling around the base of Sweden’s midfield, just as he once did on Merseyside; he recalls chasing a 16-year-old Wayne Rooney around the Everton practice pitches. The striker Marcus Allback, who set up Sweden’s only goal of the tournament so far, can once again look Peter Crouch up and down, as he used to do at Aston Villa, often from the substitutes’ bench.
Then there is the former Arsenal replacement goalkeeper, Rami Shaaban, who played in Sweden’s first match in Germany. Shaaban is still close to Sol Campbell, whom he knows as an “emotional” man. Shaaban and Campbell used to meet for coffee in Hampstead where, the Swede says, they “had deep conversations”.
Then there are the defenders. Teddy Lucic used to play for Leeds United, Erik Edman briefly for Tottenham. The midfielder Mattias Jonson checked in at Norwich City as they checked out of the Premiership. It would be challengeable to suggest that they all moved up since dropping out of English club football, or that when Lucic arrived at Elland Road while Rio Ferdinand was leaving the place, anybody saw him as a like-for-like understudy.
Linderoth, Svensson, Alexandersson, Lucic and Shaaban were not stars when they played in England, and none can really be imagined as such now, turning out each weekend for the likes of Hacken, Elfsborg or Gothenburg in their native league or for clubs in Denmark or Norway.
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When I asked Allback, 32, if this had any bearing on how Sweden measured themselves against an England side who either work in the top tier of the Premiership or for Real Madrid, he bristled: “England can think what they want about us. Yes, they have a lot of players who are important in massive clubs, and we have a lot of respect for them, but this is the best Sweden team I have played in.”
Allback spent two seasons at Villa and has a candid recollection of his Premiership adventure, which lasted until the summer of 2004: “Overall it was a disappointment. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. I don’t think so, but I’m not going to say I was the best player available and the manager was rubbish. I had a good time there. I just didn’t have the success I wanted.”
Besides, he says, Sweden should not be judged on the size of the transfer fees their individuals attracted on the way out of England. They should be assessed on their know-how. “It’s a solid team, with many players with 50 caps or more. In a big tournament you need that. If you look at the XI that started against Paraguay, we have a lot of caps out there. You need that experience.”
Within the multitude of caps, there is also excellence. Sweden’s most decorated international has a history in British football and nobody would ever suggest he left Britain as a dropout. Henrik Larsson received an MBE shortly before the World Cup for services to sport in the hoops of Glasgow Celtic. He promptly deprived Arsenal of a European Cup in the stripes of Barcelona, his arrival as a substitute in the final coinciding vitally with Barca turning a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 advantage. Larsson is 34, has 35 goals in an international career of 91 caps and is part of an attacking trio — Arsenal’s Freddie Ljungberg and Zlatan Ibrahimovic of Juventus are the others — who made Sweden the most prolific European country in the World Cup qualifying competition. “We had an average of three goals a game, and I think that was better than anybody else,” Larsson says. “And you would say we are usually a team that’s hard to beat and scores goals.” Usually. Larsson seems as mystified as the rest as to where that form has gone over the past month, not just here in Germany, where Sweden took 179 minutes to record their only goal so far — they drew 0-0 with Trinidad & Tobago and edged Paraguay 1-0 — but also in their warm-up matches, where the attack seemed bland.
Part of the responsibility rests with the brilliant Ibrahimovic, who is doubtful for Tuesday with a groin injury and appears to have carried his poor club form of 2006 into the tournament. Allback, who should deputise for Ibrahimovic, insists there’s no anxiety about the drought:
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“It’s not something we have been thinking about too much. We played better against Paraguay than against Trinidad & Tobago. Yes, against Trinidad we didn’t score and in the two games before that we hadn’t scored, but the most important thing is to create. When you do that you feel confident. Then we’re like a machine.” For 38 years, the machine has been programmed to withstand England. But the record is a quirk rather than a right.
“England are stronger than they were four years ago,” says Olof Mellberg, of Aston Villa, the Sweden captain who has heard at some volume one theory about why Sweden have struggled to score. It was put to him last week by Ljungberg: Mellberg, the Arsenal man said, was hitting too many balls long in the direction of Larsson and Ibrahimovic. The argument between the pair became feisty enough for Larsson to step in and ask them to cool it, shake hands and live with their differences of opinion. It is broadly known that Ljungberg and Mellberg are not in the habit of sharing coffee mornings in Hampstead or, for that matter, Solihull. They clashed at the last World Cup, too. Ljungberg it would be, very late in Berlin against Paraguay, who kept Sweden in a favourable position to reach the next round. Point made. “We’ve got a good enough spirit that we keep going,” Allback says. “The incident was a discussion, exaggerated by the media.”
And, he adds, we really shouldn’t be distracted by the pale Premiership pasts of some of the personnel. English football puts a high value on Swedes: “We all know, of course,” Allback says, “that England have a decent coach.”