‘Just crazy’ – Curtis Edwards leads Djurgården into final-day drama in Sweden
The last few weeks in Sweden have, Curtis Edwards admits with a laugh, been “just crazy”. Djurgården’s players would haul themselves out for another assignment, the finishing line a crucial step closer each time, and invariably do the job required of them; the only problem was that everyone else would do exactly the same and it means that, when the whistles blow on Saturday lunchtime for the season’s final round of Allsvenskan, three teams still have a realistic chance of prevailing in one of Europe’s tightest title races for years.
It has essentially been a threeway version of the relentless, blow-forblow slugfest that eventually saw Manchester City stay ahead of Liverpool in May. “You’re like: ‘Yeah, can someone get us a result?’ But it just hasn’t happened – the top three have just been winning, winning, winning,” says Edwards, the Djurgården midfielder. The contenders – Djurgården, Malmö FF and Hammarby, in that order – have dropped points in only four of the 24 games they have collectively contested in the past eight matchdays, and half of those were games between two of them.
Until Monday four teams were involved, but then Malmö finally laid AIK’s dreams to rest and left things on a knife-edge. Djurgården need a point from their trip to fifth-placed Norrköping to win their first title since 2005; quite a return to relevance for a traditional giant that has not managed a top-two finish since then. But they have comfortably the most difficult fixture; Malmö, three points behind, visit mid-table Örebro and are tied with Hammarby, who could win it on home turf against Häcken. There is hardly anything to separate the trio’s goal difference.
If Djurgården slip up then they are under few illusions: their chance to banish a decade and a half of ghosts will have gone. It has been some induction for Edwards, an English midfielder who rose to prominence during Östersund’s Europa League run under Graham Potter two seasons ago. The 25year-old signed a three-and-a-half-year contract with the Stockholm club at the end of July, just over halfway through the season.
Six minutes into his debut he scored his first goal and neither party has looked back since, with Edwards largely pulling the strings from the No 10 position (although he has showed his versatility by playing to the right and left of midfield as well). Plugging straight into the enervating mentality of challengers, of not being willing or able to concede an inch, has been a test.
“We speak about it in the team and just say we’ve got to continue what we’ve been doing all season,” he says. “Although I’ve only been here for a few months you can feel there’s a real togetherness, belief and hardworking attitude. If we have that it can take us a long way.”
It helps that, as far as Edwards can tell, there have not been exorbitant levels of pressure from outside. He just wants to get on with playing the title-deciding game and cannot wait for Saturday to come around; Djurgården’s fans feel the same way but they have not been stopping him in the street to hype things up even if letting in Hammarby, their city rivals, would surely feel like a mortal blow in reality.
“It’s a massive club with a big following but I think we’ve surprised a lot of the supporters already,” he says.
“I don’t really think this was in their expectations. It’s in our hands and we don’t want to let it slip now, but the fans are OK. They’re really proud of what team have done until now. A club of this size should be competing every year and unfortunately we haven’t for a long time, so hopefully we can give something back to them.”
The team’s joint head coaches, Kim Bergstrand and Thomas Lagerlöf, have taken many of the plaudits. This is their first season, having spent six years working wonders in lifting unfancied Sirius all the way from the third tier, and an outwardly unorthodox arrangement has paid off spectacularly. Edwards says they are “really in sync with each other” and he was impressed with the vision they sold him during the summer, promising he would be playing the kind of ambitious, technical football that Potter preached on his own way up the ladder.
It says plenty that, just ahead of Edwards on the pitch, Djurgården can field the league’s top joint-top scorer in Mohamed Buya Turay, a Sierra Leone international on loan from the Belgian club Sint-Truiden. Edwards says the main difference from life at Östersund is the sheer depth of quality and competition for places; he has mastered it so far, though, and it is the latest leap in a career whose rise verges on fairytale status.
“If I look back three years, and speak about it with my friends and family, you’d never think it is possible that I could be preparing for a game like Saturday’s,” he says. A little over three years ago he was still playing in Sweden’s fifth tier with Ytterhogdal, where he had moved for a change of scene after early promise with Middlesbrough’s academy fizzled out and left him in non-league.
“I only came across here to experience something new and it was never in my thoughts that I would make this journey,” he says. “I have to remind myself that I’ve been through some bad parts in my career but this, now, is amazing and what you want as a footballer.”
Seeing things through on Saturday would probably top everything he achieved at Östersund, he says after a moment’s thought, pointing out that Champions League football had hardly ever been on his radar. There is still a huge job to do. Norrköping have lost only twice at home, the most recent time coming in June, and beat Hammarby 2-0 at Nya Parken in September.
“They’ve got really good quality so it’s going to be tough,” he says. “But we are going for the three points, that’s the target, not just to protect a draw. We want to go there and show why it could be us winning the trophy.”