In the last year English football journalists have had to face up to the distressing thought that they now have to write about a national manager who is more intelligent than they are. The likes of Taylor, Hoddle and Keegan, with their mangled platitudes, have gone, possibly for ever. The new chap is much more evolved; sophisticated, worldly and able to speak at least two more languages than your average soccer hack.
Eriksson has yet to make his debut in Private Eye's Colemanballs column and, even more impressively, seems to have moulded a halfway decent English team through sheer force of intellect. When the time comes for him to be vilified in his turn, as it probably will, it will not be done from some higher ground. Sven may be a Swede, but he is no turnip.
Mike Bassett: England Manager, however, is a turnip. In fact, it's the Turnip. Bassett is evidently based on the career of former England manager Graham Taylor, and the real comedy of the Channel 4 documentary Do I Not Like That - The Impossible Job, which followed the last few days of Taylor's doomed 1994 World Cup campaign. The fact that the film is cast in the form of a documentary suggests that the writers, Rob Sprackling and JRN Smith, have hardly done more than fictionalise the marvellous Taylor programme whilst bunging in some rather arbitrary football gags.
There have been other comic managers, but always on TV. Peter Cook was hilarious on Clive Anderson as a club boss; Paul Whitehouse played the affable but incomprehensible Ron Manager on The Fast Show; and in ITV's excellent Bostock's Cup, a couple of years ago, Tim Healy portrayed another blustering guvnor. Tomlinson's Mike Bassett is a bit like all of these - brash, naive, working-class-lad-made-good - but not interesting enough to carry the film. Tomlinson is a splendid actor but struggles to gain our sympathy when his wooden wife and sullen son are persecuted for the bad results in Brazil.
The film is punctuated by real quotations from the inarticulate world of football. These are not as funny as when I first heard them. Talking about a Stuart Pearce type called Wackett, Bassett says: "Like Wellington once said: I don't know what he does to the enemy, but he scares the shit out of me." Here we have a line stolen from a 19th-century soldier updated by the insertion of a swear word. There are several scenes where the laughs rely on swearing and penises, which is always a sign of a lack of inspiration.
Despite all this, there are a few good moments. Before taking the England job, Bassett wins the League cup as manager of Norwich. The open-top bus taking his team through the streets gets caught up in the one-way system and careers off down the A11. Later, Bassett writes down his squad on the back of a fag packet and ends up with two additional team members called Benson and Hedges. I chuckled at these and at a couple of other points, but after half an hour I was longing for a Bovril and a watery hot dog.
Swede dreams
Do I Not Like That, the epic documentary in which a white-faced Graham Taylor watched his England side get bundled out of the European Championships, did more than reduce Taylor to a sideshow in a frenzy of national contempt. It also focused attention, to a hitherto unparalleled extent, on the stroke-inducing misery incurred by those hapless figures attempting to pull strings behind the scenes.
Before Taylor, our picture of English football managers was formed largely by the airbrushed musings in their ghost-written autobiographies. Occasional insider jobs, starting with Hunter Davies's The Glory Game, tried to sketch in the details, but lacked the camera's objective eye. No, Do I Not Like That was pivotal in football history, both humanising and ridiculing the homespun philosopher of the park.
Yet there are other precedents for Mike Bassett: England Manager as it attempts to take on the spectre of the old-time football boss. Private Eye's Ron Knee, boss of Neasden FC, spent years recycling back-page clichés for his fans. More recently the job passed to another Ron, Ron Manager, whose barely coherent ruminations distil everything that is happily moronic about football management.
When British cinema has looked to football for inspiration, the results have been less inspirational. Craggy-faced character actors tend to hog manager roles - Pete Postlethwaite in When Saturday Comes, Robert Carlyle in There's Only One Jimmy Grimble. No recent football film has got much of an audience, so most of us have to make do with memories of Michael Caine in Escape to Victory - a film that may be hopeless on many levels, but one that you can at least watch to the end. The only really successful coaches in British films have been sports teachers - Brian Glover in Kes, Jake d'Arcy in Gregory's Girl - which says something about the environment that British film-makers feel happy in.
As ever, you have to turn to US cinema for a proper appreciation of the agony of the coach. Possibly the apotheosis of coach movies is Slap Shot, the bruising saga of washed-up ice hockey player-manager Paul Newman's attempts to keep his useless team going. His solution? Import three bespectacled psychos to beat the crap out of the opposition. Very 70s in its homage to the vindictiveness of professional sportsmen behind the all-American facade, but also template-setting in its adversarial positioning of coach and athlete, experience and innocence, frustration and confidence.
Hosts of coach movies have followed. The best, it should be recorded, came from yet another Ron, Ron Shelton. He made Bull Durham, starring Kevin Costner, arguably the finest treatment of the bulldozed dreams of the humble manager yet made. America has its raft of demonic sports teachers too: while Brit teachers tend to come on like sadistic bus conductors, US ones comport themselves like boot camp sergeant-majors. The best? Try Robert Patrick in The Faculty, playing a football coach possessed by a brain-sucking alien. It's hard to tell the difference between his before and after states.