S ven-Goran Eriksson knew little about Italian football when he joined Roma in the summer of 1984. Growing up in Sweden, he could watch only English football. However, he did have a deep knowledge of Roma, as his Benfica side had played them in the quarter-finals of the Uefa Cup in 1983.

“We went to spy on them as preparation,” he laughs. The mission obviously worked, as Benfica won the first leg at the Stadio Olimpico, before a draw at home sealed qualification to the semi-finals. Eriksson’s side eventually lost to Anderlecht in the final, but he had made an impression in Rome.

He took the job after Roma’s soul-crushing defeat to Liverpool in the European Cup final at their own stadium. “It was difficult to motivate the players following that final,” he says. “Many of them had won everything with the club and there was a loss of hunger. In the first six months I wondered if I’d made the right choice.”

Eriksson also had to deal with his star player, Roberto Falcao, missing most of the campaign through injury: “He only played seven or eight games that season. He had a knee problem and the rest of the team looked to him as the leader. They told me: ‘Mister, we cannot play without Falcao.’ And when he did play, you could see the difference.”

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Eriksson recalls one of the times Falcao did play ? a 2-1 victory at Napoli. “He was better than even Maradona that day, which shows how good he was. He was a phenomenal footballer.” Eriksson faced Maradona a few times while in charge of Roma and Fiorentina . How did he prepare? “It was extremely difficult. You could mark zonally but, if you gave him space, he would destroy you. If you man-marked him, he would also destroy you. If you put two, three or four men on him, it didn’t matter. The result was always the same.”

Eriksson recalls two encounters with Maradona in January 1988, when his Fiorentina team played Napoli in the Coppa Italia and the league in the same week. Fiorentina won the cup game 3-2. “Maradona wasn’t really interested in the Coppa Italia,” says Eriksson. “He didn’t do much in the game, but after the whistle he came over to me and joked: ‘Mister, Sunday, musica differente. ’ Come Sunday, they beat us 4-0 and he was unstoppable.”

“He was a simple man, in a positive way. I had dinner with him a few times ? the last when he was living in Dubai. I think he was influenced by bad people throughout his life. As a player, he was probably the greatest ever.” How would Eriksson have coached him? “Maradona is Maradona,” he says. “Some players just need to be let free.”

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Eriksson left Roma in 1987 to take the reins at Fiorentina, where he inherited the 20-year-old Roberto Baggio. Was he the most talented player Eriksson ever coached? “Yes, along with Rooney. Baggio had everything: incredible technique, vision, pace. I remember one of our first games away to Sacchi’s Milan. We only passed the halfway line twice and we scored twice. Baggio made one and scored the other. And it wasn’t just any defence. It was Baresi, Maldini, Costacurta and Tassotti.”

Eriksson took a three-year hiatus from the Italian game in the summer of 1989. He returned to Benfica and led them to the European Cup final in his first season, which they lost to Milan. He was tempted back to Italy in 1992 by the legendary Sampdoria owner Paolo Mantovani, who treated players fairly and created a family feel at the club.

Gianluca Vialli trusted Mantovani to such an extent that, when Sampdoria sold him to Juventus in the summer of 1992, Vialli asked Mantovani to negotiate his wages with Juve on his behalf as he did not have an agent. “Talk about a conflict of interest,” writes Vialli. “The less Juve had to pay me in wages, the more they would have left over to pay him as my transfer fee. Yet Mantovani had given me his word. There was no way he would not get me the best possible deal.”

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Eriksson also speaks highly of Mantovani: “He had changed his mind about where the club could go after I had agreed to come. Mantovani told me Sampdoria could no longer challenge Juve, Milan or Inter financially, and that he was about to sell Vialli to Juve. But he told me that it wasn’t what we agreed, so if I wanted to leave, I could. But I admired his honesty, and so I accepted. We built good sides, with players like Gullit and Platt, and we focused on young players, like Seedorf, Chiesa and Veron.”

He also met Roberto Mancini at Sampdoria. By 1992, Mancini had been there for a decade and was already a club legend. “Mancini ran the club,” says Eriksson. “He would ring the kitchen and tell them that we would be late, so therefore keep the pasta warm. He would call the kit man and make sure all of the kit was ready to use. He was involved in everything. He was like one of Mantovani’s children. Mancini and Vialli used to eat at his house regularly.”

Eriksson refers to Mancini in his autobiography as a rompipalle , a “ball-breaker”. “He had very high standards and demanded it from everyone. He argued all the time with referees and with his teammates,” laughs Eriksson. “But what a talent, he could do everything on the pitch.”

Mancini garnered a ludicrously low 36 caps for Italy, with his last coming in March 1994 when he was just 29. Mancini was unfortunate that his peak years coincided with Baggio’s. “He was unlucky, yes. They were both No 10s, and maybe Sacchi could have played them both together for Italy,” suggests Eriksson. Sacchi toyed with the idea of a Baggio-Mancini duo, playing them together in several of Italy’s qualifiers before USA 94 but, given his love of the system, and his resentment about having to play individualists, he eventually dropped Mancini from the squad.

While on the subject of Sampdoria, the conversation switches from creative geniuses to the art of defending, and the granite-chiselled features of Pietro Vierchowod. Vierchowod was at the club for 12 years ? his final three under Eriksson ? and is regarded as one of Italy’s most imposing defenders. “Vierchowod was such a tough defender,” says Eriksson. “When he marked someone, he really marked them, he followed them everywhere. If a player got past him, the ball would not. It was either or ? but never both!”

Maradona , Gabriel Batistuta , Marco van Basten, Fabrizio Ravanelli and Gary Lineker have all said Vierchowod was the toughest defender they faced. “He had muscles up to his eyebrows,” said Maradona. “It was easy to pass him, but when you looked up, he was in front of you again.” Maradona eventually dubbed Vierchowod “The Hulk”.

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When Sampdoria signed Des Walker from Nottingham Forest in 1992, Eriksson thought he had “the best central defence in Italy”. But it didn’t quite work out that way. Walker did not settle in Serie A , which led to a dressing down from Vierchowod on one occasion. “He lost his patience with Des,” says Eriksson. “His pace was what got him out of tricky situations in England, but in Serie A all the attackers were fast, and Pietro told him one day: ‘What kind of defender are you, if you never get a yellow card?’”

Walker maintained that Eriksson played him out of position at left-back. Nonetheless, his confidence gradually dissipated and Sampdoria sold him to Sheffield Wednesday after only one season ? and one yellow card.

In a peripatetic career, Eriksson spent longer at Sampdoria than any other club. He won the Coppa Italia in 1994 ? the club’s last piece of silverware ? before leaving at the end of the 1996-97 season to join free-spending Lazio .

Lazio had not won anything since their first and only Scudetto in 1974 and Eriksson’s first mission was to change the mentality at the club, which he felt was personified by star striker Beppe Signori, who had a habit of complaining about everything. Eriksson says Signori would often remark: “This wouldn’t happen at Juventus or Milan.”

“I couldn’t have him at the club,” says Eriksson, who sent Signori on loan to Sampdoria in January 1998. “A very good striker, but he had a negative attitude.” He wasn’t missed, as Lazio reached two cup finals in Eriksson’s first season at the club. They won the first, beating Milan to claim the Coppa Italia, but were crushed 3-0 by Inter in the Uefa Cup final.

That game is remembered as the Ronaldo show. Alessandro Nesta has since revealed that he blamed himself on the night but, upon reviewing the match, he realised he was powerless to stop Ronaldo. However, Eriksson does not agree. “Ronaldo could win games on his own and he was very good in his first season in Italy, but it was our lack of mentality that was the biggest problem. We won the Coppa Italia a few days before and Lazio had not won a trophy in more than 20 years. As you can imagine, the party went on for a couple of days.”

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The mentality at Lazio gradually improved, with the signing of Sinisa Mihajlovic instrumental. Famed for his left foot and equally ferocious temper, Mihajlovic had unyielding self-confidence. “He thought he was the best at everything: the best left foot, right foot, best shot, was the fastest. Even when he wasn’t some of those things, he believed it, and that’s a good thing,” says Eriksson.

No one has scored more free-kicks in Serie A history than Mihajlovic, who hit a hat-trick of them against his former side Sampdoria in December 1998. “With him, having a free-kick was like a penalty,” says Eriksson. “When players used to get fouled near the box they would scream for a penalty, but Sinisa would say ‘what are you worried for? I’ll score,’ and usually he did!” Is he the best free-kick specialist of all time? “Probably,” says Eriksson. “I had the best left-footer in Sinisa and probably the best right-footer in Beckham.”

Lazio continued to improve under Eriksson and finally won the title ? only the second Scudetto in their history, and still their most recent ? on the last day of the 1999-2000 season. They also clinched the Coppa Italia that year, Pavel Nedved and Diego Simeone scoring the goals in a 2-1 aggregate victory over Inter. Key to their success was the signing of Juan Sebastian Veron the previous summer.

Given that Veron was so important at Lazio, why did he subsequently struggle at Manchester United? “I’ve asked myself that many times. I think it was that he was a leader at Lazio but, when he went to Manchester, he wasn’t. I think he needed to be the leader of teams to be himself, because he should have been brilliant for them. Veron was a genius. He and Mancini were so alike, and they could do everything on the pitch. They were leaders.”

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Lazio strengthened the squad after winning the title, signing Claudio Lopez from Valencia and paying a world record fee of ￡35m for Hernan Crespo. “When we bought Crespo and Lopez, I wanted to try to win the Champions League,” says Eriksson. However, a match in London in October 2000 would change his career forever. England lost 1-0 to Germany in a World Cup qualifier; Kevin Keegan resigned in a toilet and the FA were suddenly looking for a new manager.

“I would have regretted turning down England,” says Eriksson. “When the England job came up, and I accepted, the atmosphere within the club changed. I remember Nesta coming to me and saying: ‘Mister, no, you have to stay.’” After England announced that Eriksson would be their new coach, Lazio won only six of their next 14 games. “I wanted to try to do both jobs until the end of that season, but then the results started to turn and I realised it wasn’t possible so I resigned.” By the time he left after a 2-1 home defeat to newly promoted Napoli in early January , Lazio were 11 points behind Roma.

Eriksson was not to know it, but Lazio were about to descend into freefall. By the time he was at the World Cup with England in 2002, Lazio were selling star players and their owner, Sergio Cragnotti, was being ousted from the club and on his way to a four-year jail sentence for financial crimes. Lazio have not come close to winning a Scudetto since. Eriksson’s stock was never higher than during his time with Lazio at the turn of the millennium. “It was the best period of my career,” he says. “Seven trophies in under four years.”