April 20, 2003

The big interview: Henrik Larsson
Douglas Alexander speaks to the Celtic Superman who is preparing to ride off into the sunset after seven magnificent years



GLOBAL warming has come too late to save us. Although Scotland basked in a heatwave last week, with the brows of autograph hunters pinking as they waited outside Celtic Park in the 25C heat for their honey-skinned hero, it isn’t warm enough for long enough to stop Celtic’s magnificent No 7 riding off into the sunset after seven magnificent years.
The departure date is little more than 13 months away and, like the Iron Lady, this man of steel is not for turning. For Celtic’s supporters, the countdown to their parting from Henrik Larsson must seem like waiting
helplessly as the timer ticks on a bomb.

“I think it’s enough for me, and then I’ll see what I do,” says Larsson.
“If I get something else in a warm country, I might do that. If I don’t
get anything I will always have the option to go home to my first club
(Hogaborgs BK) and my house will be ready by then as well.

“It has to be something that appeals to me. I won’t go and play for a
team that plays for survival because that’s not the way I want to finish
my career either — being a lone striker and chasing the ball. That’s not
my game.

“Once I move away, I am going to realise what I am going to miss here
the most. It’s a big part of my career, this is the club where I made my
name. I will never forget it.”

Celtic will never forget him either. In the car park, everybody is
grabbing a piece of Larsson for posterity while they still can. From
little boys to old ladies, they wait, as they do every day, for a photo
or an autograph. Jerseys, skin, plaster casts are all put in front of
him for signing. He does this every day en route to his car. His
patience, like his goals, never runs out.

After scoring in yesterday’s 2-1 loss to Hearts, Larsson is now only
four strikes short of 200 for Celtic. He has never been sent off, and
has been booked only 13 times in 246 matches for the club — “you get
kicked a lot, but you can’t kick back”. He has hardly put a foot wrong
and has certainly never put his foot in his mouth. He is a ruthless
goalscorer, yet also a selfless creator. His skill and toughness reminds
Scots, from Sir Alex Ferguson to the man in the street, of both Denis
Law and Kenny Dalglish, the two greatest players we have produced.

The latter quality is the one that we had no reason to suspect when he
came on after 59 minutes for Andreas Thom at Easter Road on August 3,
1997, with his dreadlocks held back by an Alice band, and gifted
possession to Chic Charnley for Hibs’ winner. It proved perhaps the most
misleading debut in Scottish football’s history.

Larsson is sitting in the shade of the Celtic boardroom, his training
top has the No 7 inked on to its front and flip-flops dangle from his
spindly legs. He starts our interview with typical bluntness, by telling
me he never reads newspapers, and I remember a story of how he once
threw a journalist into a swimming pool in 1992 as punishment for a
report written six years previously about a 15-year-old Larsson. That
was a journalist he liked.

His life has been a lesson in icy self-reliance, from enduring racism as
a child, to his parents splitting up when he was 12, to his broken leg
in Lyon and his broken jaw against Livingston.

“I am very stubborn,” he warns. “Very, very stubborn. I think it’s a
quality to have but you always have to know when you have to compromise
as well — and the older I get the more I compromise. But I am still very
stubborn.”

The ice is broken by his laugh when I mention that he must feel like The
Terminator these days, because of the amount of metal that has been
inserted into him by surgeons. There is the metal pin and its associated
screws in his left shin, the one that buckled sickeningly when tackling
Serge Blanc of Lyon on October 21, 1999. There is more metal in the jaw
broken when challenging for a header with Gus Bahoken of Livingston on
February 9 this year. Larsson points to his leg and says: “I have still
got everything in there,” then to his jaw adding: “and a few more in
here. I don’t know the total. I have got a few plates, there and there,
and 15 or 16 small screws. As long as I don’t get any problems, I’ll
keep them in.”

On both occasions, his comebacks were speedy and spectacular. It was
typical that he should score after three minutes of his latest return
against Liverpool in the Uefa Cup quarter-final, and follow that with a
brave near-post header against Rangers in the CIS Cup final. That goal
also emphasised his amazing reactions because it beat Stefan Klos, the
goalkeeper with the quickest hands in Scotland. “People always have a
lot of speculation about when I should come back, but they are not the
doctors. We had our plan, but obviously you are not going to tell that
to anybody, because if you don’t reach that target then it will appear
in the papers as a setback.

“The only thing I felt was that I couldn’t really open my mouth, the
bone in the bottom jaw was stuck. That was painful, but otherwise it
wasn’t that much pain. I got my morphine shots straight away and then
you don’t feel anything. The only thing I felt was my mouth where they
had to scrape down a little bit, it felt like a big ulcer.”

Yet, as he rose at the near post at Hampden, with several Rangers
defenders in attendance, did he not think for a moment about his
newly-repaired jaw? “The ball is there, you go for it. That’s the
instinct. If you get a whack, then you just have to hope that it’s
healed. If it has not healed, then you might be unlucky and break it
again.” So it must have been pleasing, psychologically, to score such a
goal then? “We lost the final, so that means nothing.” When he talks of
the present, Larsson can indeed sound like The Terminator. To make him
human, you need to take him back to his childhood and adolescence in
Sweden. It is the people he knew then who know Larsson best.



THE doorbell of the Bjork family home rang in a suburb of the Swedish
port of Helsingborgs on the evening of June 25, 1978. As the door
opened, a small boy with curly hair stood outside, clutching a football.


Was Fredrik coming out to play? Henrik Larsson, then six years old, was
in such a rush that he couldn’t even wait for extra-time in the World
Cup final between Argentina and Holland. He had bolted from the block of
flats he lived in, desperate to be Mario Kempes or Leopoldo Luque, the
Argentine strikers.

“I grew up in the flats, and just down from my house was the biggest
grass field, and there all the kids used to come together and play
different games of football. In summers, when everybody was off during
the holidays, we used to go down and play football from early morning
until mum called you in for dinner.”

Eva Larsson was a factory worker, and Henrik’s dad was Francisco Rocha,
a sailor from the Cape Verde islands off Senegal on the west coast of
Africa. He has an elder brother, Kim, from a previous relationship of
his mother’s, and a younger one, Robert, who is also Francisco’s son.

He was named after his uncle Henrique but it was agreed that it would be
changed to the Swedish Henrik, and that he would take his mother’s
surname to help him fit in. His Christian name was soon abbreviated
further to Henke by his childhood friends.

Patrick Vieira’s ancestors are also from the Cape Verde islands, but his
family fled to Senegal when a drought hit the crops in the 1960s.
Several members of Larsson’s extended family remain, and he hopes to go
there with his father when he retires. “I would love to do that but you
shouldn’t go only for one or two weeks, you should be there for longer
to see everything because there is a lot of different islands.
Hopefully, I will have the time soon to do that.

“My dad is still in Sweden and obviously if I am going I will bring him
back. He will have to show me the language because unfortunately I don’t
speak Portuguese. I would love to go back with him and see how he had it
when he grew up, and see the family over there. My dad was a sailor,
he’s an old man now, 72 in December. He was out on the sea, sailing all
over the world on merchant ships. He ended up in Denmark first, then he
came to Sweden.”

It was from his father that Larsson got his love of football.

“We always used to watch football. We had this programme in Sweden where
they showed English games every Saturday. I used to sit up with him and
watch European Cups, World Cups, European Championships, the Swedish
national team. We watched it all. He loves football. Brazil was his
favourite team and we always used to go for them when it was a World
Cup.”

His father also rented him a video of Pele, which Larsson watched over
and over. “If you look at Pele, he could score goals but he could also
set up a goal. He has always been my idol.”

Larsson would pretend to be Pele and Brazil, and his pals would tease by
asking to be teams like Poland instead, but there were also more
sinister taunts to deal with. “I am not that dark but obviously I had my
curly hair when I was young and you get people, who don’t understand,
who will say something. I used to win the most fights as well, so it
soon stopped.

“I can’t recollect feeling that different. I only had to look at my dad
and I knew I wasn’t 100% Swedish, but when you are a kid you don’t have
those worries. You just go on with it and that depends how the other
kids are as well. There were times when people called you something. You
always have the odd ones who will say something. You have bad people
everywhere in the world and that includes Sweden.

“The older I get the more I say it is stupid people that are racists or
whatever, and mostly it is because they are afraid. I don’t understand
someone who hates someone else when they don’t know the person, just
because he’s black, yellow or whatever colour you want to mention. For
me, that’s just not comprehensible.”

Larsson remembers his childhood as a happy one, although his parents’
separation when he was 12 affected him deeply. “It’s a very vulnerable
time of your upbringing, so that wasn’t easy. It took a lot of time
before I could accept it, but that’s the way life goes sometimes and you
just have to make the best of it.”

He admits he threw himself into football to forget and became
particularly close to two coaches at Hogaborgs, Bengt Persson and
Kenneth Karlsson. Persson passed away in 1999, but Larsson remains in
regular contact with Karlsson, who was also a teacher at his former
school. “I loved playing football at that time. I trained maybe twice or
three times a week with Hogaborgs and the rest of the time I was out
playing in games. I used to play with two different teams, so I had my
mind on other things.

“Kenneth always used to look after me when I was at school. He more or
less took my side if he saw somebody older bullying me. It wasn’t only
with me, it was with every kid. I always felt I had support from him.

“Bengt was there as well with support when things weren’t going as I
wanted it to go. The club was very important for my football education
but also for educating me about life in general — about being polite and
things like that. It was very important and I will never forget. I
always try to give something back for what they gave me.”

As good as his word, Larsson sends cheques for any paid television
punditry back to Hogaborgs BK and returns when he can to present the
HenkeBoll, an award for the club’s most promising player under 16. “If I
am home, I try to give that out, but mostly I am not.”

A quarter of a century on, Fredrik Bjork, the boy whose doorbell he rang
that night in June 1978, remains his “best friend”.



DESPITE the good grounding with Hogaborgs, Larsson began to wonder if
the dreams of becoming a footballer, which he had articulated in his
school essays, would ever come true — especially when he was found
employment as a fruit-packer and as a youth worker upon leaving school.
“Looking back, I think that was very good for me. At that time, when I
was 18, I had more or less given up hope of turning pro because, if you
looked around you, there were players my age already playing at the
highest level in Sweden. It made me realise that football wasn’t
everything and there were other things to life as well. It maybe gave me
a good distance.

“It is still life and death when you are out there, but it was terrible
sometimes with me. I hated to lose, I really hated to lose. I still do,
but it was maybe more of a disadvantage to me than an advantage, because
I let it get to me too much.”

It was also around this time that he met Magdalena Spjuth — an uptown
girl. She came from a posh suburb and was a keen horse-rider, her father
was a prominent politician and her mother an education chief with the
local authority but, like Henrik’s parents, they had separated in her
teens.

She became Magdalena Larsson on Midsummer’s Eve 1996, and Larsson
describes her stabilising role in his success as “very important”.

“I don’t care about money,” says Larsson, who reputedly earns £40,000 a
week. “If you ask me how much I have, I wouldn’t have a clue. Bank
managers I don’t speak with. My wife does all that.

“As long as I can have dinner and treat myself to a few things, I am
happy with that. You won’t find me in Glasgow city centre every week,
shopping. I have money so I can buy the things I want, but it has never
been the most important thing in my life, even when I didn’t have any
money.

“The people who know me, and there’s a lot of people in Scotland who
don’t know me, but my friends back home know exactly. In that aspect, I
haven’t changed at all.”

The new maturity started to translate into his performances. He went to
Benfica, then managed by Sven-Göran Eriksson, to train, thanks to the
influence of Mats Magnusson, the famous Swedish striker. Magnusson then
returned home to Helsingborgs, Hogaborgs’ larger neighbours, and they
signed Larsson as his partner. Sweden’s scoring torch was about to be
passed between two generations.

“Mats Magnusson was the one that you aspired to because he came from the
same club and went to Malmo, went to Switzerland, went to Benfica, where
he’s as big as ever, and played in the national team. So you wanted to
do the same. Deep down, I still believed I could do it. The hope is
always there that you can achieve it.

“He was a very good player. A lot of people don’t understand how good he
was because he also played in a smaller league and, when he was in
Portugal, people used to say the same things about him that they say
about me now.”

Larsson learned rapidly from Magnusson, scoring 34 goals in 31 games to
help Helsingborgs back to Sweden’s top division. His admiration for his
veteran partner increased as he watched him play through tremendous
pain. “All that season he had trouble with his right knee. He was
two-footed like Lubomir Moravcik, which was just as well because he had
to go to the doctors every week and get the water out of the knee. He
couldn’t play with his right leg all season. Incredible.”

Larsson continued to score in Sweden’s top division, helping
Helsingborgs to fifth place, and found foreign clubs courting him when
the Swedish season ended in the autumn of 1993. His choice was between
Christian Gross’s Grasshoppers and Wim Jansen’s Feyenoord.

“Holland was a better league than Switzerland,” he explains. “Wim was
only there for two months, then he went, then we had Willem Van Hanegem,
who was quite alright, then Arie Haan. I didn’t play well in the first
year under him.

“I played in a lot of different positions — left, right, anywhere you
can imagine. The second year it started off good and I played as a
striker, and then he started to change me after 50, 55, 60 minutes all
the time, even if I was playing good. I had to get out of there, I had
to get away. That wasn’t the way I wanted to play.

“I had a meeting with Helsingborgs at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam at
the airport, but I told them that if something else came up, I would go
straight to that because I didn’t want to go home to Sweden just yet. If
you go home, you are a failure. Simple as that.

“I didn’t want to go home because there’s not many who go home and come
out again. Then Wim came and saved me.”

Marcel Van der Kraan, a Dutch journalist, provided the crucial
information, that Larsson had a clause in his contract that allowed him
to leave if an offer of £650,000 was received, although the striker had
to take the Dutch club to court to invoke it. During his signing press
conference for Celtic, Larsson was questioned on suspicion of being
damaged goods. “You might be good but you still have to prove it again,
and I don’t think a lot of people knew me and knew who I was. Wim knew
who I was and what he could get out of me, and I am just happy that he
brought me here.” Was it fate? “It’s hard to say no. You have to say
yeah.”


THERE is a faint glimmer of hope for those that cannot contemplate life
without Larsson. He recently rescinded his international retirement to
help Sweden win 2-1 in Hungary, but that was a favour to his country,
rather than a decision which will affect the future of his family.
Jordan, his son, has grown up in Scotland and is now at school here, but
Larsson is keen for him to learn Swedish, and he and Magdalena also have
a baby daughter, Janice, to think of now. “I agreed to help them
(Sweden) out if they were in a bad situation. At the moment, I will not
speculate what I am going to do in June (when they face Poland and San
Marino) because that’s too far away.” Besides being substituted,
Larsson’s other pet hate in football is spending too much time in hotels
away from his family, but surely Euro 2004 must be a tempting final big
tournament in a glittering international career? “It’s a long way away
and a lot of travels and a lot of hotels.” He helped his country to
third place in the 1994 World Cup, but feels last summer’s tournament in
Japan and South Korea was “the best chance you ever had to win a World
Cup”. After winning the Group of Death involving themselves, England,
Argentina and Nigeria, Sweden lost to Senegal on a golden goal moments
after Anders Svensson had hit a post. Before June, Larsson has pressing
club matters to deal with. The next seven days will tell us whether
Celtic are in next month’s Uefa Cup final and, although yesterday’s 2-1
Premierleague defeat to Hearts has all but handed Rangers the title,
victory in Sunday’s Old Firm match at Ibrox would give them a slim hope
of claiming a third successive title. Larsson, as always, will be a
central figure in both dramas, and he is desperate to atone for his
penalty miss in the semi-final first leg with Boavista. If required to
take one again on Thursday, he will step up, although he stresses it is
O’Neill’s decision. “You take them because you want to take them. When
you take a penalty, nobody expects the keeper to save it, all the
pressure is on you. That’s the way it is, but you should be able to
score from however many yards it is.” The booing of Neil Lennon, his
teammate, in that Boavista tie surprised and disappointed him. “I don’t
think they want anything bad for any player or for anyone involved with
Celtic, but sometimes the passion runs a little bit too high. I think
that’s maybe not the way to treat any player in the team. That’s not the
Celtic fans I know.” Larsson believes that Scottish football has been
improving steadily during his six years. Yet with him and Ronald de
Boer, the two most gifted foreigners, due to depart next summer, it
could be that a decline is about to set in. The cries of “Please Don’t
Take My Larsson Away” are going to become increasingly plaintive. What
will we do without him? “Maybe you are going to get your own players,”
he says. “I think Shaun Maloney is good, for example. You can see he has
a football brain from the way he plays. You don’t see as much of him as
we do. He hasn’t been playing that much, but when you see him practise,
and things like that, you can see he has talent. I don’t think you need
to worry too much about your height as long as you are strong enough,
and I think he is strong enough. I mean he’s only 20. That will come.
There will be ups and downs for any player, especially when you are
young. “You have got to have talents out there somewhere that are
Scottish. Everywhere you go you see kids

playing on the street, in the park. In a small country, like Sweden and
Scotland, you are always going to have gaps (in) generations. You have
to be patient. “It’s not nice because you want to see your team in the
World Cups and the European Championships because the big occasions are
very important for getting kids playing, but hopefully it’s going to
turn and you will get the big players back and the big tournaments.” It
is a small comfort, as we prepare for a loss that will not only be
Celtic’s, to think that a young Scottish boy is out there somewhere as
intent on imitating Larsson as he was once intent on imitating Pele.