The Spurs manager provides a poignant contrast with José Mourinho and his naked sense of ambition
I'm pretty sure I'm learning to read between the lines now. So much so that I strongly suspect when André Villas-Boas says it's not him against José Mourinho at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, that beneath the veiled layers of misdirection – oh, you mischief-maker, André – the opposite is actually true. But then, it is always hard to be sure of these things and Villas-Boas is turning out to be an unexpectedly intriguing figure.
Three years into his interrupted Premier League career, Tottenham's endearingly solemn and courteous manager has something almost jarringly old-fashioned about him: not just a rare sense of professional esprit de corps, but that historic football manager's air of being entirely and irrevocably trapped within the manager-shaped universe, prisoners of their own solemn, transcendent vocation.
This has always been the best kind of manager: the ones who don't seem particularly to enjoy being football managers, or even to dislike being football managers, but who like creatures of the forest simply know no other life. In England this total immersion within the managerial lifestyle dates back to the rock and roll years of the 1950s and 1960s, when the football manager first filled the skies, brown-suited darling of the crowds, overcoat flapping, arms spread thrillingly, possessed entirely by his Papal calling.
As manager of Leyton Orient in the Sixties Alec Stock worked a maniacal 115-hour week, arriving at dawn to paint motivational messages on his network of hand-built signs ("Establish Good Habits!") before re-concreting the terraces, mowing the lawn, marking out the pitch and then vomiting copiously before kick-off "out of nerves". In a single year at Southampton, Lawrie McMenemy travelled more than 100,000 miles, spoke at more than 100 functions, moved house five times and had three days off. This was simply the way of things. The manager ate, drank and managed. Cut him and he bled manager.
It is perhaps surprising that Villas-Boas should fall within this indigenous tradition. At his first glance in he looked utterly modern, even a little semi-detached, not so much a football manager as a football middle-manager, some skinny-tied corporate number‑wangler emerging fully formed from his teenage bedroom. Even now Villas-Boas resembles at times in his dreamily earnest TV appearances not so much a football manager as an extremely convincing life-sized wedding cake figurine, a marzipan groom snatched from his unicorn and prodded out in front of the cameras to talk, slightly sadly, about the mood within the collective philosophy of the group and the condition of the players within the shared dynamic mentality and all those other Villas-Boas-isms that at first sound entirely sensible but will often turn out to only half mean something, to have melted sideways into a world of woozy almost-sense, coming on in his least coherent moments like a handsome industrial android reciting passages from a European business manual through an off the shelf internet translation service.
This is totally unfair. For one thing Villas-Boas is brilliantly fluent in English, in part a legacy of his Lancashire grannie. More than this there is just something authentic about him. At a time when, at the top end, managers are generally in retreat a little – undercut on all sides by the broader hierarchies of the plc club structure – in Villas-Boas the sense of destiny, of a grand-scale idealism, is undimmed. Spurs have a separate player acquisition arm, but this is still unarguably André's team for a huge game personally and a season that will, for now, define his success or otherwise in the Premier League.
It is here that Mourinho provides a poignant point of contrast for anybody with a creeping AVB-crush. There is just something slightly depressing about the world's most relentlessly important man, so naked is his sense of entirely José-centred ambition, being concerned above all with the machinations of some frictionless corporate over-world. Villas-Boas may not have Mourinho's trophy-heft, but he does at least have a genuine sense of mission, of being consumed not by his own destiny but above all by the construction of teams. The current new-build Spurs are a thrillingly physical affair, Villas-Boas's own take on the dominant style of hard-running, high-grade attacking football. After the win against Swansea it was notable Villas-Boas scarcely lingered on the pitch, instead turning to wander off down the tunnel, looking oddly excited and twitchy, glazed with visions of some coming dawn of high-speed biceps-flexing AVB-ball.
It is of course an unusual time for managers in the English league generally. The top five clubs in the country are all led by men more famous for their management than their playing careers, four of whom barely played at all, while in the league as a whole the only real superstar player turned manager is Michael Laudrup, so brilliantly suave in the Swansea dugout you half expect to look down and notice he's dressed in a rumpled white tuxedo, still reeking of last night's cologne. This may be a good or a bad thing – and it looks pretty good so far – but it is undoubtedly also a reflection of the fact management itself has changed, that this is a highly nuanced corporate career now, something increasingly technical and refined, as opposed to the track-suited boys' club of old.
Villas-Boas is an oddity for other reasons too, arguably the most academic, white-collar person to manage an English football club, and a man whose training for the job consists solely of study and research and that extended professional training under Mourinho. It is undoubtedly a good thing for Spurs that their high-stakes, well-ordered attempt to exist among the Premier League's fiscally incontinent elite should be headed up by someone who understands profit and loss as well as the role of the modern-day false nine and a half. And who, happily for the sympathetic neutral, still carries, in with his priestly sense of calling, his absolute conviction of the nobility of the touchline life, something of the cold dead hand of the deep managerial past.
via Football news, match reports and fixtures | theguardian.com http://feeds.theguardian.com/c/34708/f/663845/s/31c6b972/sc/13/l/0L0Stheguardian0N0Cfootball0Cblog0C20A130Csep0C270Candre0Evillas0Eboas0Etottenham0Echelsea/story01.htm
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