RIO FERDINAND DRUGS ROW: One phrase kept turning up in Sven Goran Eriksson's answers to questions at his various press conferences yesterday.

"As a football man," he began, over and over again, prefacing almost every answer to the inevitable question about Rio Ferdinand's enforced absence from his England squad.

"As a football man, I always want the best team," he said in response to one of the many inquiries designed to tease out his true feelings on the matter.

"But when these things happen, there are other people who make those decisions and I have to accept them. I would like to have Rio Ferdinand for this match because we need him. But that's a football opinion."

It was to turn himself into a football man that Eriksson came to England during his early years as a manager, hoping to learn the secrets of such great figures as Bob Paisley at Anfield and Bobby Robson at Portman Road.

Simplicity, directness, commitment, honesty, passion. These were the qualities that appealed to a young Swede who watched English matches on television. What he thinks of it now, he keeps to himself.

In the intervening years Eriksson learned about other football cultures. Working in Portugal and Italy, the country boy from Warmeland acquired a layer of worldliness.

Yesterday, still struggling to accept the decision of Mark Palios, the FA's chief executive, to deprive him of a key player, Eriksson gave his press conference in the very room where, on November 2nd, 2000, he was introduced as the England manager.

Welcomed into the job by a barrage of xenophobic newspaper articles, then as now Eriksson kept his cool and said how much he was looking forward to working with a talented generation of young English footballers.

Almost three years later he is a survivor of a roller coaster ride that has lurched from euphoria to derision and back again, often in the space of a single weekend.

He was right about England's young footballers, though, and no doubt he had worked out that the six years of his contract would coincide with the prime of such stars as Michael Owen, David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Paul Scholes, Sol Campbell and Rio Ferdinand.

Once he reported for duty, he worked hard to identify other young players of promise, including Ashley Cole, Wayne Bridge, Wes Brown, Frank Lampard, Joe Cole and Darius Vassell. And then came Wayne Rooney, who appeared to possess the most prodigious talent of the lot.

What he has since discovered, unfortunately, is that in too many cases a decent amount of football ability goes hand in hand with a tendency towards behaviour that tends to make headlines on the front rather than the back pages.

Coping with constant inquiries about the behaviour of English hooligans would be bad enough without having to defend footballers who been caught in some indiscretion or other, usually when they are outside his sphere of influence.

Although the English Professional Footballers Association (PFA) yesterday threw its weight behind Ferdinand's case, it seems little can be done before the big game this Saturday.

PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor believes that the Football Association's drug-testing policy has been called into question.

"The FA have totally breached their own rules which say there is to be no disclosure of a player's identity until there has been a clear proof of guilt and a punishment has been imposed," he said.

"The FA have made their minds up not to select him for the England squad, and I find that disgraceful. They have hung him out to dry."

To add to Eriksson's problems, his leading striker, Michael Owen, is still struggling with a shin injury picked up during Liverpool's 2-1 premier league defeat by Arsenal on Saturday.

Owen is rated at 50-50 to play in Istanbul. As a result, Eriksson gave a late call-up to Aston Villa striker Darius Vassell, who scored in a 2-0 win over Turkey in Sunderland last April.

Defender Sol Campbell is also a worry as he will be sentenced by the FA today for his clash with Manchester United's Eric Djemba-Djemba in the Community Shield in August and could be suspended for Saturday's game in Istanbul.

Meanwhile, Turkish riot police were preparing for England's arrival by staging crowd control exercises. More than 5,000 officers will be deployed to prevent any trouble at the game.

In a regular training session, 80 officers with riot shields and backed by armoured vehicles confronted a noisy crowd of demonstrators throwing Molotov cocktails - a simulation which authorities hope will not become reality.

It would be amazing if Eriksson's attitude to English football had not been altered by the difficulties these outbreaks of indiscipline and off-field antics.

With rumours abounding that Eriksson is being tempted to join Roman Abramovich's revolution at Chelsea, the time that this "football man" returns to full-time club football may be fast approaching.