SVENNIS K did not know what he had done. He was not aware that he had committed a crime, only of the fact that he was guilty and must be punished. There was no avoiding this fate. And a crime was not, in fact, entirely necessary, or even the punishment. It was the guilty verdict alone that mattered.

Yes, Sven-Göran Eriksson, before he could even take the England football team to Germany, where they could read Kafka in his original tongue, has been traduced. Like Joseph K in The Trial, he must now be expelled, the fate that awaits everyone who enters the Kafka-esque landscape of England international football.

They all go the same way, these England managers, and they all go wondering what their crime had been. And when you ask their judges, jurors and executioners, you discover that they don’t know either. Some managers are dismissed, some resign — ’tis all one. The important thing is that they must depart under some kind of duress. We must seem to be doing the expelling.

Kevin Keegan went for the crime of tears in the face of the enemy, for trying to be every England player’s new best friend and for the ultimate crime of honesty — for saying dolefully, dramatically and with piercing self-understanding, that he was not up to the job.

Glenn Hoddle went for the crime of heresy. This was unusual, but there were previous offences that made the final one terminal. He had betrayed the trust of his players in a grubby little literary exercise, he had annoyed too many people by playing keepy-uppy every time a camera showed itself at an England training session, he had behaved with arrogance without the justification of victory.

Terry Venables went for the crime of fantasy, believing comically that he was a crash-hot business mogul, a renaissance man and a first-class football coach. Only one of those was even remotely true and when his involvement with m’learned friends grew all-engrossing, he, too, had to go.

They all go. Graham Taylor went for the crime of being a decent man found wanting, also for certain capital offences against grammar. Bobby Robson went for the crime of taking England to the World Cup semi-finals. There is no link between the crimes. The only thing in common is the office of the criminal.

I used to believe that England managers had to go whenever the results became too disappointing and that some excuse or other — heresy or gambling or fraternising with sheikhs — had to be found. I now see that this was wrong, for we have got rid of Eriksson and his results have been singularly good.

What is his crime, if indeed, there is a crime? Guilty of the crime of Swedishness. It has taken us five years to discover this, but Eriksson is, we now know, seriously Swedish. We might have guessed this, perhaps, from his public remarks: “Vell, in the second half . . . they also make a goal . . . it is a pity.”

But no, this revelation of Swedishness has struck from a clear sky. Eriksson is a foreign mercenary and, like all mercenaries, is always open to a better offer. He was revealed by the “fake sheikh” as a man who likes money and power to the point of folly. If those things hadn’t been true, he wouldn’t have taken the England job in the first place. So let’s get rid of him and get a real Englishman to take over. Better a bad English manager than good foreign one, eh?

Eriksson has agreed with his employer to miss the last two years of his contract in exchange for a decent payoff. What do you expect him to do, fling himself on his sword and say, ‘Keep your money for the love I bear to Merrie England’?

But the truly rum thing about this business is that the “fake sheikh” is not a handy excuse for a parting of the ways, a thing gratefully pounced on because the results have been getting steadily worse. If you look for a crime behind the crime — the ultimate crime of all football managers, of not winning football matches — then there is none.

England qualified for the World Cup finals with the rare luxury of a match to spare and they go into the tournament as one of the favourites. With a fit Wayne Rooney, England have the best chance of winning since 1990, when they might have sneaked it, or 1970, when they might have won it gloriously.

So why must Eriksson go? Not because he is Swedish but because he is England manager. Because we get rid of England managers as a matter of meaningless habit. People blame the News of the World. Blame away. Anybody would think that nobody bought the damn newspaper. The News of the World worked the “fake sheikh” sting to please its readers. It follows, then, that readers — English people by and large — seriously enjoy seeing an England manager being traduced.

There is a need, it seems, for the England manager to be seen as a traitor, a need to destroy him. And now, as the Eriksson business proves, we don’t even need to wait for him to lose football matches. The process of expulsion fills some strange atavistic urge deep in the English psyche.

So now we’ve got him at last. And behind Eriksson’s calm and measured press conference statements, I could discern another feeling. It might be summed up as demob happiness, as end-of-term delirium. Almost, I expected Eriksson to recite: “No more Latin, no more French, no more sitting on the old school bench.”

Vell, as Sven would say, perhaps this joyous feeling of nothing to lose will work wonders when England go to Germany in June. Perhaps a coach freed from anxiety is perfect for the last stages of the job. Eriksson treated his players as grown-ups and brought out in his team a sense of individual and corporate responsibility — and with it an unprecedented sense of self-confidence and stability. Not small things. Now he must go and a period of instability and uncertainty will follow.

It is a pity.

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