I’d love a return to English football

FORMER ENGLAND BOSS SVEN, 71, ON HIS DESIRE FOR A COMEBACK

coaching a fourth division team here. You would think you were a little bit crazy. But I love it.

“I do get offers. Whenever a job comes up, there are agents phoning me up as soon as someone is sacked.

“But from there to actually talking to a club is a long way. I have not coached or managed professionally since February. That is a long time.”

After leaving England, where he lost only five qualification games in his entire spell in charge, the Swede’s career has been nomadic. He had an initially brilliant spell at City, as the big money arrived, but that fizzled out and he was sacked.

Then it was on to Mexico, Notts County (as director of football), the Ivory Coast, Leicester, BEC Tero in Thailand, Al Nasr in Dubai, Guangzhou, Shanghai SIPG and Shenzhen in China, and finally the Philippines.

Eriksson admits he has regrets – one of them leaving European football so soon after City axed him in 2008, and heading off around the world. He has, he believes, fallen off the coaching radar – although he was recently linked with Hearts.

This is a man who won the UEFA Cup with part-timers Gothenburg, took Benfica to the European Cup final winning everything domestically, and won six trophies with Lazio.

There were the off-thefield problems with a well-documented love life which have dogged his career, not least in England.

“I don’t like to look back,” he said. “I made mistakes. But the big thing I regret was leaving Europe. I was very angry when I was sacked by City. I thought I would do something totally different. But when you leave Europe, you have been forgotten.”

Of his England record, he added: “The longer it goes on, the better I seem to have been for people. But when I did not go further than the quarterfinals, that was not good enough for people. Today, it does not look so bad.

“In Germany, in 2006, we should have reached the final. I don’t think there were any better teams than us.

“In my time, expectations were high. Now they have gone down a little bit – and that is good.”

GARETH BALE had a second-half tap-in disallowed as the El Clasico drew a first blank since 2002. The Madrid superstar (below) thought he had given the visitors the lead when he tapped home from Ferland Mendy’s low cross. But the linesman flagged for offside and VAR replays showed Mendy had just edged in front of the last defender. Madrid had the best of the first-half and Gerard Pique cleared a Casemiro header off the line. But Barcelona could have taken the lead against the run of play when Lionel Messi played in Jordi Alba, who volleyed an effort wide. It was a typically bad-tempered game, with three bookings for Barcelona and five for Madrid.