Perhaps it is time to cut André Villas-Boas some slack at Tottenham
This is a Spurs manager who has no other ambition beyond the simple business of becoming the most important person in the known footballing universe
Barney Ronay
guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 July 2012 13.28 BST Comments (17)
Tottenham's new head coach André Villas-Boas checks out the club's new training facility. Photograph: Henry Browne/Action Images
It has been an unhappy week for football, notable not just for the rise of the knobheads at the high court, but also for news of a corruption scandal at Fifa so appallingly entrenched and shameless it still seems almost impossible to grasp fully, like coming across the Queen fly-tipping asbestos waste in a country lane in Kent, or discovering that the world actually is controlled by an ancient cartel of industrialists and that they've decided to just come out with it and stop pretending and maybe even do a behind‑the-scenes reality TV show.
Against this backdrop of hideousness there was something oddly heartening about the return in full-page panoramic close-up of André Villas-Boas, now formally in place as the new head coach of Tottenham Hotspur, and appearing, austerely suited in the middle of all this wretchedness, like an unexpected knock at the door from the local curate, who against all expectation you find yourself delightedly ushering inside.
Welcome back, André. It has become fashionable to see Villas-Boas as a rather tarnished figure, to recall the frictions of his time at Chelsea, to balk at that familiar air of manicured expectancy. And to portray him instead as a kind of weak-chinned, own brand José Mourinho, Donovan to Mourinho's Dylan, a provincial Wimpy bar to Mourinho's gleaming McDonald's, a managerial Sindy doll of prodigious inauthenticity.
This is more than a little unfair. If nothing else there is much to admire in the way Villas-Boas is still out there, still thrusting himself to the front of things, displaying the unshakable backseat extroversion that all the best managers have, as he winces and struts centre stage in skinny-trousered splendour, looking each time a little more like a tiny little dancing soldier on top of a wedding cake, or, increasingly, like a particularly convincing waxwork of himself.
Plus of course he is fascinating to listen to, gushing forth unstoppably with the kind of words and phrases that may, in isolation, mean something, and which, if you squint, do actually seem to mean something, but which in fact don't mean anything at all, beyond a generalised conviction that the collective is strong and we have a good feeling for this project to achieve high levels of positive action within the shared beliefs of the group. This kind of talk is pretty much unique to Villas‑Boas, the sound of a man speaking with admirable fluency in a language not his own, but about concepts that are themselves fatally vague: flimflam at one confusing remove, but still somehow both convincing and also endearing, like watching a very earnest android attempting to learn how to dance.
He is, though, entirely genuine when it comes to his own basic footballing obsession. It is not hard to see what drives Villas-Boas. Here finally is a man who is not in it for the money, who is instead consumed by football, or at least by his own aspirational, hobnobbing notion of what football may amount to. This is perhaps why he cuts such a deliciously moreish figure.
Just as successful sitcoms tend to be based around characters who are trapped in some way, unable to escape into any life other than a father-son rag and bone business or a chat show host who has already bounced back, so Villas-Boas totes about his own wonderfully gripping sense of circumscribed conviction. It is completely impossible to imagine him doing anything else. This is a manager who has no other earthly ambition beyond the simple business of becoming the most important person in the known footballing universe.
It is genuinely ennobling, this belief in the basic sanctity of the managerial mission. "We must build on Harry's great work," Villas-Boas said this week, bestowing an unexpected gravity on the legacy of a manager who has traditionally been a kind of footballing Cat in the Hat, a tousled and infectious improviser who could probably cook you the most brilliant meal you've ever tasted simply by hurling everything in the fridge into a massive bowl and then flambéing it over a raging fire built from every stick of furniture you own, before abruptly disappearing just as you come round, dazed and hungover, face down in the ashes of what was once your kitchen.
What kind of manager is he anyway? Judging by the abundance of pre-emptive analysis this week it seems Villas-Boas likes a three-man or perhaps four-man midfield that can play fast and also slow, rigid but also fluid, energetic but also patient, tall and also simultaneously short. He likes attacking full-backs who defend and defensive midfielders who attack. He favours goalkeepers who leap and spring and save penalties. He insists on having strikers who score goals. And no doubt if he can set all these aspects of his grand plan in train at once Spurs can expect to win most matches comfortably, finding themselves at least eight or nine goals up by half-time against a series of tearfully demoralised opponents.
Beyond this, perhaps the most important thing about Villas-Boas is that he is interested in systems, the kind of coach who doesn't seek to adapt and tinker but instead to impose a template for success from his own pre-cast theory and methods. It is a common trait among that new breed of technophile manager, the coach who sets his sights not on being louder or more nebulously inspirational than anyone else in the room, but on being more methodical, more comprehensively dossiered-up, on calibrating most effectively the cost-to-value ratios of his players.
It isn't hard to see why this kind of manager is attractive to a club like Spurs. It is perhaps the only sensible response to the annihilating forces of footballing billionairedom. Managers like Jürgen Klopp and Marcelo Bielsa – not to mention Villas-Boas at Porto – have all succeeded recently at clubs outside the carbon circle, or beyond the uber-marketed regional superpower. This is where it's at for the ambitious young Euro-manager. And while it is received opinion that Villas-Boas was simply the wrong man for Chelsea, it is equally true that Chelsea was an unflattering fit for Villas-Boas, a spendthrift club of enduring player-celebrity that was always going to chafe against his vision of success through micro-managed control-freakery.
That sense of galvanising mystique is also a part of this new breed of manager: a certain style, a way of talking, an air of stossily tailored otherness. So perhaps it is time to cut Villas-Boas some slack. There is an alluring purity of purpose, even in his oddities. And while his own semi-fluent vision of a system within the spirit of the collective to achieve the search for titles that powers the group may or may not work out, it will undoubtedly be fun – and also oddly refreshing – to watch him try.
