Scandal: Crisis time again

My Sportsmail colleague Jeff Powell, in his splendid biography of the late, great Moore, captures the intrigue in detail of how the squad flew to Guadalajara, leaving Moore under house arrest for five days.

Imagine what the consequences might be if David Beckham were to visit the gold souk in Dubai next month and be falsely accused of stealing a £5,000 gold ring and you get some idea of the commotion that took place over the framing of Moore.

Of course, it was to be another 12 years before England would qualify again for a place in the World Cup Finals, the qualifying competitions in 1974 and 1978 both proving abortive.

The excitement in 1981 was to take place in mid-air and unbeknown to the media corps, who were travelling at the back of the aircraft carrying the England squad home from Budapest on June 7.

A week earlier, England had lost a World Cup qualifying game to Switzerland in Basle, a match that had been tainted by appalling incidents of hooliganism and for five days manager Ron Greenwood-had come under intense newspaper criticism. The squad flew on to Hungary to record a fine 3-1 win in the Nep Stadium, where one of the two goals scored by West Ham's Trevor Brooking had famously lodged between the net and stanchion.

A man of great integrity, Greenwood, the long-serving former West Ham manager, would write in his autobiography: 'It was a period of failure and bitter criticism that made me feel I had let my country down.'

Greenwood drew the curtain between the front and back of the plane and told the players he was quitting.

He later wrote: 'It was only a heated, emotional appeal by the England players themselves on the plane that persuaded me to change my mind.' Bobby Robson, the natural choice to follow Greenwood, thus had to wait until after the following year's World Cup in Spain to take up the job and the man in charge at the 1986 and 1990 tournaments had more than his share of crises and headlines.

He was victim of some fierce criticism before the 1986 competition from ex-England manager Sir Alf Ramsey and two former captains, Kevin Keegan and Alan Ball.

'The job breeds unpleasantness, aggression and jealousy,' Robson wrote in his 1986 World Cup diary.

'Sir Alf began travelling the country with a journalist commenting on England players. You try to accept it with dignity and take the punches that go with the job. But if you keep punching someone on the nose, then sooner or later that person is going to punch back.'

But four years later Robson took more blows, some of them landed by Sunday newspapers which had bought allegations about his private life which disturbed the then strait-laced FA.

It offered him no guarantees beyond the 1990 Finals and Robson was stunned to be told by a journalist that the FA had already decided that Graham Taylor would be his successor.

'It seemed that everyone except me knew for sure that I would be leaving after the World Cup,' Robson recalled. So, with the players already selected for the Finals in Italy, Robson was forced into hasty negotiations to secure the manager's job at Dutch club PSV Eindhoven as soon as the competition was over.

The instalment in 1998 came in La Manga, Spain, when Glenn Hoddle brought about his own demise with the clumsy manner in which he chose to tell Paul Gascoigne that he was not to be a part of the World Cup carnival in France.

Greenwood once said of the job of England manager: 'We are talking about the impossible.'

Just how impossible, the unruffled Eriksson is now finding out.