Outside the dramatically beautiful Saitama stadium the pullmans were waiting to leave, their engines thrumming in the darkness. In the England coach, the faces of the players were blank. There was no chatter. They were absorbing the lessons of a difficult night. Behind them, in the second vehicle, the Swedish players were all smiles, standing in the aisle and leaning over the backs of their seats to share their thoughts with their team-mates.

"When you lead 1-0 and then you draw the game," Sven-Goran Eriksson said, "it's like you lost it. You shouldn't think like that. But that was the feeling in the dressing-room after the game. So I told them, we are not in a funeral here. We've just started the World Cup, and it will be long."

A drawn game may seem to be an exercise in equilibrium, but it has two faces and they can wear contrasting expressions. For England the draw represented their failure to hold on to something. For Sweden it represented their success in coming back from a reverse and in finishing the match with such a crescendo that their only regret came in not managing to pull off the last-gasp victory.

"A lot of lads are down in the dressing-room," David Beckham said, but nowhere was the disappointment more marked than on the face of the England coach. We cannot really know the full extent of Eriksson's desire to see England beat his homeland's team for the first time since 1968 last night, because he would not consider it either decorous or polite to his opponents to tell us. But his expression suggested that it had been an awful lot.

This match was a rite of passage for Eriksson as much as for the team, and the task of devising a swift cure in time for the meeting with Argentina on Friday will in all probability form as good a test of his personal resources as he has yet faced at any level during his time in the game.

"It was a strange game," he said. "We did very well in the first half. For the first 35 minutes we controlled the game and created some good chances. We thought we would win, but the game changed. After that Sweden were stronger than us. They started to put in the long balls with better quality and they were very good at winning the second ball. We suffered a lot there."

Disappointing, then, but not altogether surprising. "They are unbeaten for 17 or 18 games so you know you are meeting a very good opponent. Sweden are maybe not as brilliant as Argentina, but they are very difficult to beat." And until half-time, as he said, England thought they had brought it off.

When it started to go wrong, when Sweden came on to their game and the pitch began to look too big for England, the inability to sort things out from the touchline was frustrating. "We couldn't keep the ball as we did in the first half, but the few times we were able to keep it up there in the second half we created problems for them."

He took off Darius Vassell, he explained, because he wanted a bigger player in the middle of the attack. This was a controversial decision both because many people thought Vassell had been playing well - much better on the night, certainly, than Michael Owen, who failed to find a solution to the problems presented by the deep-lying Swedish defence - and because it entailed moving Emile Heskey into the front line.

Having Heskey's height in the centre may have been useful in theory, but by that time the provider of England's best crosses had been withdrawn. In truth, David Beckham never looked ready to play a full part in the match. His movement was sluggish and he seemed reluctant, once he taken possession, to sprint the few strides that would enable him to deliver crosses into positions of maximum potential.

The continued recovery of all his recently-injured players suddenly becomes crucial. "Every day we can gain now," Eriksson said. "The players will get more and more fit. This was the first game. We didn't win, we didn't lose. We have to look forward with great faith. And next time we will hope to do more than 45 minutes." At least the nature of the task is now straightforward. "We have to play two finals if we want to get into the second round," he said, "and why not? Everything is possible."