Larsson relishes chance to prove Sweden's mettle

For two Swedes who have made Britain their home, tomorrow's encounter in Saitama will start to prove whether they are truly international class.

Sven Goran Eriksson and Henrik Larsson are respectively Sweden's most famous manager and footballer. Eriksson was regarded by some in Italy as being adept as a "high-class loser" who stumbled to the scudetto with Lazio and whose departure left some observers unsure of his real gifts. Larsson, Sweden's finest striker, is someone whose impact on the international stage has been fleeting and whose avalanche of goals for Celtic have been devalued by the weakness of the Scottish Premier League.

Larsson does not think that any breakaway to England by the Old Firm will come before he makes his planned return to Sweden in two years' time. His son, Jordan, named after the world's most famous basketball player, would be nine then and Larsson is anxious to oversee his schooling in Sweden. And, strangely, he says people in Glasgow did not come up to him in the street urging him to stick one on the Auld Enemy in the World Cup.

"It's going to be tough for Sweden. We know what a difficult group we are in," he said. "I just hope we can believe we can do something, otherwise we might just as well stay at home. If you look at England and Nigeria, let alone Argentina, we can see the size of the task facing us. We are the underdogs and it's up to us to make the most of that."

The focus on Eriksson across Sweden and England has grown ever more intense as tomorrow's game beckons. One Swedish tabloid (they do have them even in Stockholm) declared him a "traitor" for preparing a side to play his own countrymen but he remains far more famous than his opposite numbers, Tommy Soderberg and Lars Lagerback.

"The media attention on Mr Eriksson back home is phenomenal," said Larsson. "There is a lot of focus on England anyway because we always watch the Premiership games on television but now Mr Eriksson is the coach there is even more.

"In the past when we didn't have good coaches for the Swedish national team, his name was always right up there on the list to take over. He is one of the biggest names in Sweden. If you mention his name, everybody knows who you are talking about. I don't know if there will be any public resentment against him if England beat Sweden, but if they do, it will be a tough question for him."

Larsson was given his first football by his father, who developed a passion for the game in his native Cape Verde Islands, at the age of 16 months, and was nurtured on the exploits of Bob Paisley's great Liverpool sides, especially Kenny Dalglish and Terry McDermott. Tomorrow, Larsson knows that another Anfield icon, Michael Owen, will test Sweden's record of not having lost to England in his lifetime to the limit.

"He has been around for, what, five years now and he is only 22. He is a tremendous striker, one of the best. There is no limit to what he can achieve because you are supposed to reach your peak at 27. I don't think it's just Michael. If you look at the whole team England have, it's a quality side from back to front."

In contrast to Owen, who scored his first World Cup goal as a teenager, Larsson was relatively late breaking into the professional game. He was 21 and had been working as a fruit packer and supervising a youth club when he signed his first contract with Helsingborg, worth £300 a month. His first season brought him 34 goals, but at both Feyenoord and Celtic he was to prove a slow starter. His first 16 games in Rotterdam saw him find the net just once while his debut for Celtic was marked by his giving the ball away at Easter Road to present Hibernian with their winner.

Strangely, Larsson was rarely used by Feyenoord as a striker. "They played me everywhere, left wing, right wing midfield," he recalled. "But being a centre-forward was the only position I saw myself as."

His first taste of a World Cup came on the left as a substitute against Cameroon in Pasadena, watched by a crowd of 83,900. Sweden, who were to finish third in the 1994 tournament, were 2-1 down when Larsson intervened. "I came on with 25 minutes to go," he recalled. "I was on the left wing but I remember wandering over to the right and getting the ball outside the centre circle from Roland Nilsson. I had this crazy idea to have a shot. I struck it hard and the ball came down from the underside of the bar, letting Martin Dahlin score from the rebound."

Larsson played poorly in the subsequent fixture, a 1-1 draw with the eventual winners, Brazil, who were to beat them in the semi-finals, and found himself on the bench for most of the competition. True, he scored the final penalty in the shoot-out in San Francisco which eliminated Romania in the quarter-finals and found the net in open play in the third-place play-off with Bulgaria, but it hardly compared to Owen's impact at France '98.

Larsson's only other international tournament was Euro 2000, which came less than a year after he suffered a horrific broken leg in Lyon which put his whole career in jeopardy. "Everybody in Sweden wants to forget the European Championships. It was such a disappointment for the players because we didn't perform as we know we can do. We beat England to win the group and played very good football in qualification but when the time came to perform in the championships themselves we did not do it."

At the age of 30 this will be Larsson's second and final World Cup. Should he begin it with a goal, let alone a winner, against England, the cheer will be heard from Stockholm to Sauchiehall Street.