The greatest barrier to success is fear of failure

As England survey a post-Rooney landscape, Andrew Fifield says that the coach will have to rid himself of his tactical straitjacket

Sven-Goran Eriksson was once asked, long before he committed himself to the England loony bin, to summarise his managerial philosophy. "The greatest barrier to success," he replied, "is the fear of failure."

It is a remark which hardly seems credible to supporters who have grown grey watching Eriksson's anodyne brand of football, but now is the time for the Swede to heed his own advice. England always expects when World Cups approach, but in Germany this summer, the demands centre less on success, and more on style. Above all, a nation wants its side to play without fear.

Fate has not been kind. Wayne Rooney, the one player who is guaranteed to swat away any butterflies on the eve of battle, is hobbled. His Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, never comfortable with the pressures placed on his striking protege, recently claimed that the competition would provide a litmus test for the squad's senior pros but it is just as great an examination of the man charged with coaching them for the final time.

Eriksson has the unwanted reputation of a manager who is frightened of change, but now he has no option other than to adapt. Rooney will not be available until the quarter-finals at the earliest, and probably not at all, so any pre-conceived formations and plans which involved the 20-year-old should were scrapped as soon as he hit the turf at Stamford Bridge on the season's penultimate weekend.

It was a moment which shredded English spirits, and not least because of Eriksson's dubious track record of coping with adversity. The country still shudders at the stultifying exit from the 2002 World Cup, which was defined by Eriksson, cross-armed and glassy-eyed, watching immobile from the sidelines as Brazil, shorn of the red-carded Ronaldinho, comfortably kept his team at bay for 35 minutes in the gruelling Shizuoka heat.

The inquest began almost immediately. There was a lengthy charge-sheet compiled against Eriksson, the most damning of which - at the time, at least - centred on his inability to rouse his players after Rivaldo's equaliser just before half-time. Perhaps the most memorable quote of the whole tournament came in a damning appraisal of Eriksson's powers of motivation from an anonymous England defender: "We needed Churchill but we got Iain Duncan Smith." Eriksson had a right to be bemused by the accusation of being a cold fish.

Had he not been hired as an antidote to the patriotic posturing of Kevin Keegan? But it was not his lack of fervour which was fatal in Japan, so much as his inability to change England's shape or structure against a side who should have been ripe for the taking.

Eriksson is wedded to 4-4-2, a formation he believes best combines defensive solidity with attacking threat, but against Brazil's fluid, dynamic system, it looked ponderous and unimaginative. Tellingly, Joe Cole, the one player who might have been able to exploit the extra space left by Ronaldinho's early exit, remained glued to the bench.

The midfielder is far better in 2006 than he was in 2002, but even so his readiness to pull defences out of shape and create room for others made him the obvious antidote to England's creative malaise. Eriksson, however, retreated into his shell and instead plumped for Kieron Dyer, a willing worker, but hardly the man to wreak havoc. The moment, and the match, was lost.

Shizuoka is the biggest indictment against Eriksson in his time at Soho Square, but recent history suggests he has not learned from his mistakes. England 's defeat against Northern Ireland en route to qualifying for Germany 2006 was astonishing for many reasons, but most remarkable of all was the way it highlighted England's tactical inadequacy.

Ironically, this was a rare occasion when Eriksson dumped 4-4-2 in favour of a single striker, with Rooney shunted to the left wing. The result was the archetypal slow-motion car crash: England huffed and puffed without even once suggesting they could squeeze inspiration from Eriksson's bone-dry system, and Northern Ireland promptly snaffled the points with a classic sucker-punch.

"There was no direction," grumbled the former England captain Terry Butcher at the time. "We had more formations than a ballroom dancing team. Who was in charge out there?"

That was not the only question on the nation's lips. Why had Rooney, England' s brightest attacking hope, been used as a makeshift wide midfielder? Why had the palpably unfit Michael Owen been selected ahead of Jermain Defoe? Why, with England 10 minutes away from one of the most embarrassing results in their history, had Eriksson replaced Frank Lampard - the perfect embodiment of the modern goal-scoring midfielder - with Owen Hargreaves? Typically, Eriksson's responses were as illuminating as a candle in a gale.

"Of course if you lose to Northern Ireland and play badly, everything is wrong - the players and the tactics," he admitted. "But have I lost the players after this? There is no chance."

And there's the rub. Eriksson has been accused of many things since he first flashed that Sphinx-like smile to the English press in January 2001, but losing the dressingroom is not one of them.

Some would regard this as an achievement, particularly as England’s squad contains more than its fair share of inflated egos and combustible personalities. But, in terms of Eriksson’s strategic flexibility, it has become a burden.

The coach is now too close to his players. The fact that there are certain members of the England team – Beckham, Owen, Lampard and Steven Gerrard, to name but four – who are undroppable has become almost a running joke, but the ramifications for the team’s chances of success are deadly serious. Instead of choosing the best available players for his preferred system, Eriksson chooses – apparently arbitrarily – a system which accommodates his favourites.

Windsor Park was the most notorious example, but the nadir arguably came a year earlier at the European Championships when Eriksson decided to shoehorn his Untouchables into an ill-fitting diamond formation. It was not until the group match against Switzerland that a delegation of senior players, led by Beckham, Gary Neville and Sol Campbell, pleaded with him to revert to the more comfortable 4-4-2.

“We all decided that 4-4-2 was the best thing,” admitted Beckham. “Sven sat us all down and asked us which system we felt most comfortable with. He said, ‘I’m the manager but I’ll listen to you as well.’ That’s how it should be.”

It would be foolish to suggest that a dialogue between management and players is always unhealthy, but Beckham’s revelation that it was the squad, rather than the coach, who effectively enjoyed the final say in the team’s tactics was greeted with dismay. Eriksson, once hailed as the icecool super-coach, had apparently become little more than a manager by proxy.

Now, belatedly, that theory could be disproved. News of Rooney’s broken metatarsal may have prompted outbreaks of wailing from Newcastle to Newquay, but the loss of the Wunderkind may just give England’s manager the opportunity to stitch together his tattered reputation, provided he can concoct a plan which allows his squad to forget the loss of its most talented player.

It is a decision which requires boldness, and Eriksson, for all his reputation as a footballing conservative, is no stranger to adventure. When he was taking his first tentative steps into the world of management with the Swedish club Degefors in the late 1970s, Eriksson scrapped the club’s traditional passing game in favour of a more direct approach.

The decision did not please everyone – “I thought it was boring,” said Lars Arnesson, who sacked Eriksson as his assistant when he was appointed Sweden manager in 1980 – but the rewards were instantaneous, with Degefors winning promotion twice in as many years.

Similarly, at Lazio, Eriksson proved that he was not afraid to ruffle feathers in a bid to stock up on silverware. After years of numbing underachievement, he swept away the dead wood in Rome and gave the club a distinctly Latin hue by signing six Argentinian internationals, at a cost of ¤135 million.

A year later, the Serie A title was delivered, as promised. By the time he left to take charge of England, Eriksson was so beloved at the Stadio Olympico that supporters unfurled a banner at his final game which read: “Goodbye Sven – Champion of Style”.

Eriksson might enjoy a similar send-off from England fans if he ends their 40-year wait for silverware this summer, but he will only do that if he reverts to his old daring self. The early signs are promising: the inclusion of Aaron Lennon, the exciting Tottenham winger, in his World Cup squad was a surprise, but the selection of Theo Walcott, the 17-year-old who has yet to even start a game for Arsenal, was nothing short of gobsmacking.

Eriksson even displayed a hitherto hidden theatrical flair by making Walcott the last of the 23 names he read out at London’s Cafe Royal. But this is not just a question of personnel. Eriksson might believe that the job of a national coach is simply to “have good organisation and be very good at picking the right players at the right moment”, but he must now display the tactical nous expected of a man earning ¤7 million a year.

He is lucky. While some of his coaching peers are left fumbling blindly for talent, England boast a myriad of options. The most intriguing involves deploying Steven Gerrard – so effective for Liverpool, but curiously underwhelming for England – in the “Rooney role” just behind Owen, with Michael Carrick, fresh from an exhilarating season with Tottenham, nestling as a holding midfielder.

Eriksson is notorious for giving little away at his press briefings, but the early signs are that shackles are being broken. “I have known for many years that Steven Gerrard could play in many positions and one of those is the second striker,” he said at the squad’s training camp in Portugal. “Gerrard is definitely an option there, and that is very good. But of course, I hope we will play Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney up front. That is the best formation we can have.”

Those last few words are a throwback to the cautious Eriksson, one who stubbornly refuses to accept that Rooney will be unable to defy conventional medical wisdom and trot out, pain-free and match-fit, in Frankfurt against Paraguay on June 10th.

It is time for the delusions to end. England’s dream of a triumphant return from Germany did not shatter along with Rooney’s metatarsal, but they now need their coach to prove that all the hype, hysteria and hope which accompanied his appointment was not mere bluster. It is not too late for Eriksson, but he must remember his own doctrine and nullify the fear factor.