He would step with beautiful judgement through the minefield. Now he does a selling gig in the garb of the national football manager, a task with ludicrous potential for loss of dignity – and worse.It is sure to recall for some the occasion when the Everton striker Duncan Ferguson, whose detestation of the media dates back to the time in Scotland when it had the temerity to report that he had been sent to prison for assault, convened a press conference to discuss solely the quality of his football boots. His sponsors, like Eriksson's, had specified that the thrust of the questioning would concern the wonders of their product rather than items of more immediate interest, but naturally his interrogators tried it on. After he said for the umpteenth time that he was only there to discuss his boots, the inevitable question duly arrived. "Will they help you to forge an effective partnership with Kevin Campbell?"For the urbane Eriksson, owner of a palatial home near Regent's Park and desirable addresses in places such as Rome and Lisbon, to have his duties as England coach linked so closely with naked salesmanship on the pretext of news is surely a strange lapse of judgement in a man who plainly knows the value of keeping his own counsel.Keegan, Hoddle and Graham Taylor did themselves heavy damage with their willingness to say more or less anything that popped into their heads. Keegan made himself a hostage to his own quotes almost every time he opened his mouth Hoddle literally talked himself out of the job.

Taylor signed up for a documentary which turned into something close to a professional suicide note.Eriksson is surely too sophisticated to make such blunders, but yesterday he was part of something which seemed to make a vice out of what some of us thought might be a virtue. There was a strong, clear value to his decision not to perform for the media circus. If he had the confidence of the players, if he could walk blindfold through media traps that had so fatally ensnared some of his predecessors, and if he could do something as remarkable as beat Germany 5-1 away from home without a hint of triumphalism, we could go without his stream of consciousness. Eriksson was his own man, and so be it as he worked to wipe away the doubts about England's ability to qualify for the World Cup But yesterday he was not his own man He was the England coach owned by a computer outfit. His status and his function was annexed in the cause of selling a toy.There is nothing wrong with a celebrity helping to sell a product.

Eriksson could eat Shredded Wheat for the cameras, as Hoddle did before the break-up of his marriage. But that did not involve a cynical exploitation of his role as England manager. It did not have journalists attending a press conference in the hope that they would hear more from Eriksson than the endorsement of a product at a time when the nation is aglow with interest in the build-up to a World Cup. It was not a crude crossing of the line which naturally separates journalists from advertising copywriters.His principal employers were certainly not eager to talk about yesterday's arrangement.