OOPS, SVEN DID IT AGAIN

The continuing saga of England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson took another strange twist this week. After earlier in the month celebrating his fifth anniversary of being in charge of England, Sven accepted a big money consultancy offer for a proposed football academy in Dubai, UAE. Staying in a seven-star hotel and cruising the Persian Gulf in a luxury yacht, Sven believed he was in the company of an Arab sheik who was setting up a football academy in the region and, more lucratively, interested in buying Premiership club Aston Villa and installing Sven in charge.

The catch? The supposed sheik was actually a News of the World reporter undercover. The whole episode was the culmination of a sting six months in the making to try and catch the notoriously dull-spoken Swede out on all matters England. It worked and how. Sven, all caught on video tape, actively encouraged the in-disguise reporter to purchase Aston Villa from the “sick old man” (Doug Ellis, Villa’s 83-year-old chairman) and put him in charge at an after-taxes rate of 5 million pounds a year, close to 10 million dollars. All as soon as the little business of the World Cup was over this summer.

Sven assured them he could lure an unhappy David Beckham from Real Madrid to a middle-of-the-road club like Aston Villa.

Sven also went on to call Rio Ferdinand lazy, Michael Owen unhappy and only at Newcastle for the money and roll his eyes at Wayne Rooney’s decidedly working-class roots. Nothing exactly in his words was entirely earth-shattering, indeed they merely confirm what the majority of football fans already surmise, but the loose-lipped nature of the affair and Sven’s ease at betraying his players’ confidence with somebody he really didn’t know that well yet who was potentially dangling a major payday in front of him have upset England fans.

It is now less than five months until kickoff in Germany, and now Eriksson has to re-build a team chemistry that’s rarely been glowing to begin with. England do tend to play as a collection of individuals, rather than a team, and Sven, demonstrating he obviously looks out for himself first and foremost in this whole crazy scheme, shows that this aloof attitude comes from the top. Sven has already personally apologized to his players, and they have predictably backed him (they love him for his leniency off the pitch.) Sven has done this before, first openly flirting with Manchester United and Chelsea in previous years, not to mention his countless tabloid-worthy trysts with beautiful women, all leaving his generous employers, the FA, very red-faced. However, we has undermined the confidence of a team and a nation that craves its first major trophy in four decades, and now he has it all to do to regain their trust and affection.