Nice guys do not always come second and, if you do not believe it, just look at the career of Sven Goran Eriksson. The man chosen by the English FA to be the next full time England manager is, without any doubt, a "nice guy" - affable, courteous, intelligent and articulate. He is also a winner, and proud of it.

For years, until he led Lazio to a title success last season, Italian commentators had used the "nice guy, but . . . ." qualification when it came to assessing the 52-yearold Swede. The label was understandable, but misplaced.

Eriksson, you see, has been part of the footballing furniture in Italy since taking over at AS Roma back in 1984. Much respected and much admired, he was always (until last May) seen as an elegant loser, partly because both his Roma team (in 1986) and his Lazio side (in 1999) had gone desperately close to winning the league title only to crack on the second last day, both eventually finishing second.

During the course of a lengthy interview last December with Eriksson in his bunkerstyle office at Lazio's Formello training ground, your correspondent asked him if he ever got tired of the "nice guy, but loser" label.

With a big grin that masked the determination in his voice, he replied: "That sort of thing doesn't bother me anymore. I know what I have done or not done."

What Eriksson has done, of course, is to remain consistently among the European coaching elite ever since he first emerged when leading IFK Gothenburg to the Swedish title back in 1982.

A modest, lower division player, Eriksson had the wit to switch to coaching early. He was only 29 when he guided Swedish third division side Degerfors to promotion in 1977.

That success with Degerfors earned him the Gothenburg job and his league title win there, in turn, saw him move to Portuguese club, Benfica, where he won consecutive league titles in 1983 and 1984.

Since then, with the exception of a three-year return stint at Benfica at the end of the 1980s, he has been consistently employed in Italy's Serie A (with Roma, Fiorentina, Sampdoria and Lazio, in that order).

Remaining "consistently employed" in Serie A may not sound like much to those unfamiliar with the day-to-day pressures of Italian soccer, but holding onto your managerial job for 12 out of 13 seasons in Italy requires all the survival and balancing skills of a Niagara Falls tightrope walker.

"Nice guys" could be expected to hit the drink. Indeed, in recent times, celebrated coaches such as Marcello Lippi and Fabio Capello - and nobody ever accused either of them of being a "nice guy" - have been among those unceremoniously sent packing.

Eriksson has survived because he is much more than a nice guy. Beneath the affable, bespectacled Scandinavian exterior, there lurks a tough guy, rarely seen in public.

Just prior to a Lazio Serie A game last season, the club's Croat striker Alen Boksic (now with Middlesbrough) came up to Eriksson and complained about the size of his team shirt.

An incredulous Eriksson looked at the Croat for a second and then said: "Ok, Alen, you don't have to play today. Just go home. Now."

One of Eriksson's most significant achievements with Lazio last season was his brilliant handling of a squad rotation system that saw him consistently use almost the entire 24-player squad. This entailed having to drop men like Argentine Diego Simeone, Yugoslav Sinisa Mihajlovic, Chilean Marcelo Salas, Portugal's Fernando Couto, Italian Roberto Mancini et al, all a touch temperamental on their day.

It was a calculated gamble that could only have been pulled off by a coach who is both sensitive to his players' psychological needs while at the same time capable of commanding their respect. Last December, he explained his philosophy to The Irish Times.

"At Lazio, I try to do everything I can, I make a lot of changes from one match to the next and, at this stage, we almost have two entire teams . . . These are all class players, all household names in their own countries, they've never been dropped before in their lives, so they hate being left out of the team . . . But I think, now, they are beginning to understand especially since by now everybody has been dropped for some match."

On those occasions when the players failed to understand, such as the morning that Simeone and Couto started kicking lumps out of one another at the end of training session, then Eriksson the "hard man"

again intervened. He ruled that both players be left behind at Formello, rather than travel for that weekend's Serie A game.

Eriksson himself still has reason to regret that on at least one other famous occasion in his career, he forgot to play the "hard man". That came during the second last week of the 1985-'86 Serie A season. His Roma side had staged a remarkable comeback to go joint top of the table with Juventus on the penultimate day.

Roma were clearly the more in-form side and expectations of a Roma triumph created a frenzied atmosphere of week long "countdowns" and "forecasts" that eventually saw Roma blow it all, losing 2-3 at home to relegation-bound Lecce.

Six years later, I met Eriksson while we were both travelling by train from Stockholm to Malmo during the Sweden '92 European Championships. Curious about those distant 1986 events, I asked him - Eriksson is the sort of person who remembers names and faces and whom you can sit down beside on a train journey - what had gone wrong.

"That week was crazy. If I could do it again, I would take the team away from Rome and tell the club president to go away and stay away. A pity, I didn't do it then."

Eriksson's commitment to attacking soccer, his regular use of the 4-4-2 system, his excellent command of English (he speaks it arguably rather better than some of his predecessors in the England job) and his 20 years of experience at the top of the European footballing tree are all qualities that have clearly won over the English FA.

More important than all of those qualities, however, are Eriksson's political savvy and his well-disguised iron determination. Eriksson will command the England players' respect and they are likely to play, and play well, for him.

He may not command the British tabloid media's respect nor understand its oft-time destructive bent, but he is unlikely to let that worry him. As he said last December in relation to the possibility of being sacked by Lazio if he failed to win the title:

"It might be like that, but I never think that way. You can't live like that . . ."