Television - Andrew Billen on a profile of the England football coach that's up close and impersonal

English football doesn't have simple heroes, only tragic heroes - tragic heroes with tragic flaws. David Beckham's tragic flaw, for instance, was his Achilles metatarsal. But what is Sven-Goran Eriksson's? Why has the svelte messiah become just another Ron Knee?

How different it all seemed, even to someone not all interested in soccer (eg, me), when Eriksson was appointed England coach in 2000. As Piers Morgan, the editor of the Mirror, said on Seven Days That Shook Sven (Channel 4, Sunday 30 March, 9pm): "This was Hoddle with brains, Keegan without the emotion. This was a hybrid robotic figure that would lead us to glory." Except Sven didn't. Not even the football commentators could get excited about the win over Liechtenstein on the previous day; of the previous 17 matches, England won just five.

Michael Hewitt's documentary, clearly organised on the title-first principle, examined important moments in Sven's career in the hope of finding his flaw. What everyone wanted it to be, naturally, was his Achilles willy, and none more so than Morgan. Taking a holiday from anti-war pamphleteering, Morgan described himself as a "red-blooded" tabloid editor. He could not believe his luck when the Mirror show-business team presented him with the Ulrika Jonsson scandal: "The two most famous Swedes on the planet, at it!" Thanks to Morgan's paper, all tabloid hell broke loose in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup, leaving Morgan - a little hypocritically, you may think - to moralise: "I wonder how much he became distracted by all the stuff off the pitch . . . and for that he has only himself to blame."

Ulrika was not his first indiscretion. After he joined Lazio in 1998, the already divorced Sven began an affair with Nancy Dell'Olio. This was a bad idea all round. She was "fiery and hot-blooded" (Italian, you see) while he was cool and steely (like all Swedes, once they're out of the sauna). Worse, she was mixed up in right-wing politics. Worst, she was married to a high-profile Italian lawyer who was one of Lazio's biggest investors. "He knows he is doing something wrong," explained an Italian journalist. "He is f***ing the wife of one of his employers." Yet when Sven broke the news to this high-profile Italian lawyer over dinner, the high-profile Italian lawyer cheerfully laid down his wife for the club he loved.

Such generosity might have warned Sven to look the gift horse in her toothsome mouth. Instead - although the programme did not make the link - he allowed himself to think that his players' dodgy politics were as much a private matter as his girlfriend's. Lazio, whose most famous supporter was Benito Mussolini, has long had a reputation for racial intolerance. When one of his squad, a friend of the indicted Serbian war criminal Arkan, called Patrick Vieira a "f***ing black monkey" during a game Sven, instead of firing him, announced that in his view, remarks passed between players on the pitch should remain private - as if the Arsenal player had kissed and told.

"Following his indulgence of the unsavoury Serb, Sven was frozen in the headlights of bad publicity," said the voiceover. By the time he was offered the England job, crowds were gathering at the gates of Lazio and shouting: "Just go to your Englishmen! Go to hell and take your girlfriend with you."

Sven, it gradually emerged, is not as clever as his Exte spectacles make him look. Promoting Beckham to captain was a good idea, but it was the sum total of the strategy. When the metatarsal fractured, six weeks before the team flew to Japan, Sven had no Plan B in mind. Indeed, his almost tantric calmness may cover nothing more profound than complacency. This is a man who drifts into adulterous affairs and who, midmatch, failed to fire up his team in its crucial World Cup encounter with Brazil. At Roma in the mid-Eighties, he organised the victory party first and then watched the club throw away the championship in the last game, against a bottom-of-the-division side. "Zibi" Boniek, a former Roma player, said mysteriously: "It's an Italian superstition that when you see something like that, you scratch your balls."

The problem with this programme was that it left you scratching your head. It seemed to know that it had not got very far with its analysis. Partly this was because the makers failed to interview anyone who actually knew Sven at all well. The closest it got to a mistress, for example, was a PR consultant who had got as far as a kiss and a coffee with him at the Heathrow departure lounge. "He remains an enigma, a blank screen on to which we project differing conclusions," Hewitt's script concluded. As you can tell, the voiceover was appallingly written.

Poking holes in a national institution that is already sinking is a Channel 4 speciality. After years of attacks, the royal family, for instance, seems to have retired from public life. But this programme was not stylish enough, or witty enough, or authoritative enough. The only good thing about it, really, was its title. If only Eriksson had turned out to be our saviour, though. The documentary could even have been called Sven Days That Shook the World.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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