Be careful of what you wish for

There’s a tale - apocryphal or not - about Eden Hazard’s relationship with Antonio Conte when they were both at Chelsea. Such was the eardrum-bothering volume with which the Italian coach would bellow instructions from the touchline, the mercurial winger would arbitrarily switch wings if Conte’s seal-like barking got too much. I must admit, from way up in my East Stand Upper eyrie at Stamford Bridge, Conte’s vociferous chuntering - with Tannoy-strength projection - could be equally as irritating.

There’s no question that the new Spurs coach is effective, decisive even, and may just be the thing that chairman Daniel Levy needs to shock his embittered, lethargic and indifferent players into performing. Nice guy as Nuno Espírito Santo is, he came across as too casual in his authority at Tottenham, running into the perfect storm of Harry Kane angling for a move to Manchester City, impacting his previously symbiotic relationship with the otherwise dependable Son Heung-min, while allowing the ego-on-legs that is Dele Alli to retreat even further into his own agenda, which seemed to be as much about having a good time as knuckling down with the job he gets paid handsomely for.

Should I care about any of this? Well, obviously not. Football’s laws of tribalism ensure that not only do I not care about any team other my own, but also that the ongoing existential drama of what it is to be seemingly permanently “Spursy” is only to be laughed at. Which I do. I also don’t care about the idea of Conte taking charge in N17. He won Chelsea the Premier League in his first season in charge, and then the FA Cup in a somewhat insipid final at Wembley, before parting company with the club (and then taking it to court). The same was the case when José Mourinho joined Tottenham (and, indeed, Manchester United) - we had the best out of him, won titles and enjoyed the psychodramas that come with his involvement in a club, but moved on with gratitude. 

Conte is, by turns, likeable and charismatic, but also by reputation, difficult to handle. And, let’s face it, Chelsea get through managers with a higher frequency than I buy underwear, so it’s hard to get too attached to any of them, even a club legend like Frank Lampard. Thomas Tuchel will, I’m sure, at some point, fall out with the club hierarchy, and the revolving door will spin again. So we enjoy things while we can. Conte, on the other hand, has a different challenge at Spurs, namely to deliver success to a club that has spent longer than I care to remember believing it should be hoovering silverware, but consistently falling short. Unlike Liverpool or Manchester United, who have the Shankly and Ferguson legacies to draw on, Spurs have never had an imperious phase, even if their fans believe - from what and where, I have no idea - that they do. 

The agreement to appoint Conte as new head coach, on an 18-month contract worth up to £15 million a year, will need to deliver. Unlike Nuno, Conte has a somewhat more substantial track record, having won five league titles as a club manager (and over seven campaigns). Even if his last appointment, at Inter Milan, ended with the sack, he still managed to take the nerazzurri to their first Serie A title in more than a decade. He therefore arrives in north London with his work cut out, and even though the opening overtures from the club hierarchy have been positive, it won’t be lost on many that Spurs’ original approach for Conte in the summer, to replace Mourinho, ended after Conte allegedly expressed concerns about the club’s strategy and funding for recruitment. Tottenham suggested that they didn’t see eye-to-eye with Conte on squad strengthening, and a perception that he wasn’t interested in working with youth players (a hangover from his Chelsea days). Clearly, then, these red lines have been removed. 

Conte has since made a statement that the summer was “too soon” to take over at Spurs, but that doesn’t bely the fact that, wherever he goes, he has high expectations of clubs spending to match their ambitions. Daniel Levy is not known for his largesse (especially as he’s going to be paying for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for many years to come).

“The terms must have changed,” Chris Sutton said last night on BBC Radio 5 Live. “[Conte] isn't going to go to Spurs unless he feels he can win something or come close because he is not that type of manager. He is not coming to the end of his career. He wants to come in and transform the club.” In that, Sutton said, Conte will be doing Spurs a favour, rather than the other way around, helping out an unemployed top-tier coach. It won’t, though, be an easy ride. 

From Day 1, Conte faces plenty of challenges. Principal of those will be getting Harry Kane scoring goals again, which also means restoring the 28-year-old’s love for the club badge. No mean feat, that, when his head was so publicly turned by the prospect of City. The second challenge will be to restore a sense of team unity. It was notable that no player gave any statement of sympathy for Nuno, not even a patronising “wishing the gaffer well”. Rumours spilled out from Tottenham that team spirit had been allowed to fray by a head coach who was not a great interpersonal communicator, whose vision wasn’t well translated to the 11 on the pitch, and for those players not considered to be in Nuno’s immediate thoughts, a sense of being frozen out or ignored. 

Football management is about squad engagement as well as managing disappointment - just look at what happened to Frank Lampard when he started to work with a core of younger players at the expense of older heads. I hate the notion of player power: the manager should be respected otherwise discipline breaks down, but it’s worth noting that so far, Thomas Tuchel has been able to keep a large squad happy with tactical rotations to cope with the various competitions Chelsea are currently in without any obvious disquiet in the ranks.

There is, though, also a tactical challenge that Conte will face. Spurs fans have a tradition of expecting their team to play a certain way, and while this isn’t as bad as it sounds (i.e. coaching from the terraces), it does play into the club culture, one that has become ever so slightly entitled. If there’s one aspect of this I’d say, as objectively as I can as a supporter of a despised rival (and, therefore, what do I care?), is that Spurs need to get back into a more attacking frame of mind. That doesn’t just lean on Kane’s shoulders (though he could help), but on the entire formation. So far this season they’ve been far too tentative - and the results have shown. That might come through the physical intensity Conte will put the team through. At Chelsea he was notorious for the punishing training routines at Cobham, and during his single full pre-season put the squad through the kind of ‘beasting’ ordeal that SAS recruits might baulk at. Conte is also a disciplinarian (just look at his fractious relationship with Diego Costa), and that will come into sharp focus with Alli, who’d been all but abandoned by both Mourinho and Nuno, and even Mauricio Pochettino, suggesting that it wasn’t them, but Alli himself who has been the problem.

Another challenge Conte will encounter is longevity. No one is naive enough to think that any job in football is for life, and the fact that the Italian has only been signed until the summer of 2023 suggests that his appointment is more of a project than the start of a legacy. From a Spurs perspective, there is also Conte’s reputation for managing for the short term, not always through choice. “He left Inter [at the end of last season] because they couldn't invest money and they sold his best players,” points out football writer Gabriele Marcotti. “He left Chelsea because he couldn't get owner Roman Abramovich to spend more money on players he wanted.” Marcotti says Conte has form in this area, recalling a tale about him leaving Juventus saying that “they wanted me to eat out in a 100 euros restaurant with 10 euros in my pocket”. Marcotti believes that Spurs, with its notoriously profligate attitude to buying players, might leave Conte short-changed.

For his part, Conte has spun the inevitable PR line about why things didn’t work out between him and Spurs just four months ago. “Last summer our union did not happen because the end of my relationship with Inter was still too recent and emotionally too involved with the end of the season,” he said in a statement. “So I felt that it wasn't yet the right time to return to coaching.” But added: “The contagious enthusiasm and determination of Daniel Levy in wanting to entrust me with this task had already hit the mark. Now that the opportunity has returned, I have chosen to take it with great conviction.” Just as well, then, that Nuno sleep-walked into his P45.

The managerial merry-go-round is a constantly baffling thing. The minute a manager is fired, a list of runners and riders tipped to replace him is quickly assembled, even if you can’t help feeling that they’re all red shirt-wearing crew members of the Starship Enterprise being summoned to the transporter room (you might need to look that reference up). Managers like to talk of “relishing the challenge” and “opportunities too good to miss” when they sign up for the most poisoned of football’s chalices. Conte is far from cannon fodder, but it’s hard to imagine that Spurs will be any happier an environment to work in than anywhere else he’s been and subsequently walked away from. You kind of wish him luck, but then that wouldn’t be a rival football club fan’s sentiment, now would it?

The day football came back...briefly

I don’t know about you, but I’m passing the extended lockdown by noting anniversaries of the otherwise mundane: the last time I had a coffee at Caffé Nero, the last time I went swimming, the last time I saw someone in the flesh who wasn’t a member of my immediate household. That sort of thing. For example, Easter Sunday marked an exact month since my last haircut, and given my barnet’s normal growth rate, I’m surprised I'm not yet resembling Tom Hanks in Castaway.

It is now six weeks - SIX - since I last saw a football being kicked in anger, (Chelsea's 4-0 battering of Everton, since you ask, easily the best game I've seen this season). In other circumstances this might have bothered me, but like so many aspects of the viral crisis, there are other things that now take priority and, frankly, football is not one of them. Not that football isn’t perfectly capable of crowbarring itself back into consciousness, whether it is the idiot Kyle Walker getting caught in flagrante with a couple of “sex workers” who clearly weren’t members of his household, or his former club Tottenham Hotspur digging itself into a hole by placing half of its 550 non-playing staff under the government’s furlough scheme and imposing 20% pay cuts on other employees (despite being the world’s eighth-richest football club which recently posted record annual revenues of £461 million and a profit of around £70 million). Facing a backlash from its own fans and even some players, Spurs have wisely made a U-turn, with Daniel Levy, the club’s chairman (who earned a cool £7 million last year) announcing that all non-playing staff will now get paid in full for April and May, with only the board taking a pay cut. Last week Liverpool staged a similar volte face. In truth, clubs like Tottenham and Liverpool - 8th and 7th, respectively, for global club revenues last season - can most afford it. Others, like Bournemouth and Norwich City probably can’t and have carried on with drawing on the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

We are on shaky moral ground, here. Elite football generates - and spends - ridiculous amounts of money, money it earns, if it is a Premier League or Championship team, from they eye-watering deals done with television companies. Matchday gate receipts and income from merchandise and sales of dodgy burgers is, for some clubs at this level, something of a bonus. For clubs lower down, however, every last bottle of Coke sold could be the difference between a bleak future or not when this thing is all over. Here, like so many businesses across the spectrum of enterprise, there are people working at these football clubs who earn a mere fraction of the sums trawled by the players they serve. That said, Spurs should never have put themselves in the spotlight with such a PR disaster.

In a club statement Levy said: "The criticism the Club has received over the last week has been felt all the more keenly because of our track record of good works and our huge sense of responsibility to care for those that rely on us, particularly locally. It was never our intent, as custodians, to do anything other than put measures in place to protect jobs whilst the Club sought to continue to operate in a self-sufficient manner during uncertain times.” Be that as it may, but when the businesses of the very fans who keep these clubs going are facing very uncertain futures, Spurs' unnecessary insertion in the coronavirus news cycle was ill-thought through especially, without little fanfare, while other clubs have simply been getting on with it (Leeds United’s first-team squad have agreed wage cuts to assist others at the club, Juventus players have taken a four-month pay cut and Barcelona players have agreed to a 70% pay cut).

Picture: Nike

Were it not for this brouhaha, football would have dropped completely from view. I am, though, inclined to care less about whether the current season ends, or whether Liverpool’s somewhat justifiable receipt of the Premier League title, happens or not. "Staying in, saving lives" has replaced everything else in my consciousness. Last Monday I started a new job, which at least managed to supplant days framed largely by an unhealthy diet of rolling news and watching delivery vans out of the living room window speed up and down the road. Covid-19 has rapidly reshaped our priorities and interests, not that football was exactly an obsession. But I've now realised how much of my time was, pre-crisis, spent on watching, reading, WhatsApping, tweeting and blogging about football. And then, nothing. Like I'd reached the end of the universe and discovered that beyond it, there is nowt. Well, there was, until Easter Sunday when, in much the same manner as EastEnders' Nasty Nick appearing out of the blue to say "'Ello Ma, fancy a cuppa?", the football void was momentarily broken by a bittersweet memory. On Sunday afternoon the BBC cast our minds back to something which, despite coming 30 years ago, still fills football fans with tear-inducing nostalgia: Italia ’90.

The 1990 FIFA World Cup, to give it its full name was, for England fans at least, a moment of mass cultural change. Football was still in the doghouse after the 1985 Heysel disaster and, just a year before, the Hillsborough tragedy in Sheffield. The game didn’t exactly disappear, but it certainly wasn’t where it is now - or at least was before that nasty little virus arrived on these shores. Italia ’90 was a football tournament, obviously, but it managed to transcend that in England, largely thanks to the BBC’s coverage of it. Fronted by the smoother-than-silk Des Lynam (“Desmond”, as commentator John Motson consistently referred to him), the Beeb bought into the dreamy Italian vibe with Luciano Pavarotti’s rendition of Nessun Dorma from Puccini's opera Turandot as its theme tune. “You’ll be humming it soon – you’ll know the words to it by July 8”, Lynam quipped on the opening day, setting an incongruously cultured tone to coverage of a tournament normally less sophisticated. I’m not going to recall the whole thing here - Roger Milla corner flag dance and Totò Schillaci’s eye-bulging reaction to scoring a winner notwithstanding - rather than reminisce over last Sunday’s unexpected flashback: West Germany-v-England.

By 1990 England had been bereft of international footballing success for a full 24 years (“30 years of hurt” would prevail beyond Euro ’96), so England reaching a semi-final against Frans Beckenbauer’s pre-unification West Germany was a big deal. Before the tournament had begun the usual negativity surrounding England had been added to by news that manager Bobby Robson would leave after the competition to join PSV Eindhoven. Then came England’s opening game, a dismal 1-1 draw against Ireland. For the next match, against the Dutch, Robson changed the system around, allowing the-then 23-year-old Paul Gascoigne’s talents fully into the fray. England would win their group, raising prospects - “could this be the year, finally?”. Gazza became a joy to behold and easily England’s breakout tournament start. His supply to David Platt in the last-16 tie against Belgium, enabling the striker to volley spectacularly into the goal with seconds to spare in extra time, marked the youngster as the one to watch. Next came Cameroon in a quarter-final, from which England progressed, just. By this time of the World Cup, Italia ’90 fever had reached its peak. As Des had predicted, Nessun Dorma had become the soundtrack of the summer (along with New Order's World In Motion). Coupled with England’s run, with a team comprised of players in their prime, like Gary Lineker, John Barnes, Des Walker and even Peter Shilton, who seemed old in 1990 (he retired soonafter) but looked absolutely rock-solid between the sticks, we were lured by the charms of the Italian peninsular, its islands and its football culture. Channel 4's Football Italia would come not long after (and could be a whole separate blog post, as I waxed on about James Richardson laconic Saturday morning magazine show).

In that Italian excursion in the summer of 1990 there was one last challenge: that semi-final, on Wednesday, 4 July at the Stadio delle Alpi in Turin. The last group of Englishmen to get out of the northern Italian city with their dignity intact was probably Charlie Croker’s men in The Italian Job, but here was Bobby Robson’s team, on the back of lucky but scintillating results, facing the mighty Kaiser, Franz Beckenbauer, and his imperious collection of blond, mullet-haired grafters. I could go on lengthily about that game, except that I won’t. If you missed Sunday’s streamed broadcast then I hope the BBC will dig it out again sometime, and you’ll be able to relive what felt like the first truly romantic football experience of my life. It had highs and lows, and some of the best England football I’d seen at that stage, Gazza in particular proving to be so inventive through the middle, until his rashness showed through and ‘Gazza’s Tears’ became as much an icon of Italia ’90 as Pavarotti’s aria. And the lows? England hitting the inside of the German upright in normal time and then again in the extended period after Lineker’s 80th minute strike had kept them in the game, only for the penalty shootout to end in disappointment for Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle (though lucrative commercials for Pizza Hut must have alleviated the pain for the England left back).

Sunday’s airing of the 1990 semi-final brought back the memory that, in some small way, football had been excused, especially in England. It was OK to talk about the sport again amongst friends and colleagues. England hadn’t just come close to their first final in a generation - indeed, closest to winning the World Cup on foreign soil than any England side before or since - they also played with an aplomb the national side’s critics had hitherto been bating them for. Some might argue that the euphoria of England hosting the Euros six years later - and suffering a similar fate to the Germans… - beats the Italian World Cup in 1990. I just see it as a turning point in football’s reputation, when the classical surroundings of stunning Italian cities, some broadly decent games sprinkled with era-defining moments, did much to restore football. You could even say that Italia ’90 recovered the sport from the neanderthal ugliness that had periodically impaired its profile in the '70s and '80s. It was fun to be transported back 30 years to that July evening. Strangely, it didn’t make me hanker for football to return yet in 2020. Football will come back, like everything else - going to the pub, shopping for clothes, going to the gym - when it’s the right time. Yes, some clubs will suffer. Many will even go out of business, like so many other commercial activities. But it will come back.

Be careful what you wish for

Picture: Tottenham Hotspur FC

What a time to be alive. Senior members of the royal family trying to grease their way out of guilt-by-association, doing it badly and keeping the news cycle going for almost a week; the leaders of our two biggest political parties showing themselves to be about as trustworthy as a balsa wood ladder in heavy weather; and then Mauricio Pochettino being sacked as Tottenham manager on the Tuesday night, only to be instantly replaced next morning by the high-maintenance, highly expensive and highly self-opinionated José Mourinho.

As a Chelsea fan I am supposed to be shocked, appalled, even, by this news. After all, Mourinho is the man who said, in 2015, he couldn’t manage Tottenham because his emotional attachment to Chelsea was so strong (though to be clear, after Roman Abramovich sacked him for a second time, he was legally prevented from managing another English club for two years. Ironically, that sacking came after an abysmal away game at Tottenham, at the end of which Diego Costa petulantly threw his training bib at the Portuguese manager, and Chelsea hovered over the relegation trap door). The truth is that I’m not shocked at all. Frankly, I don’t think that Pochettino had been doing anything particularly badly, but 14th place in the Premier League is clearly not where Spurs would want to be, given the talent at their disposal. But something clearly wasn’t right, and despite Tottenham’s persistent excellence, nothing ever came of it in terms of trophies. Oddly, there were parallels in Tottenham’s fortunes to Chelsea’s profile under Mourinho in his last spell there - overseeing a decline that took them from Premier League champions in May 2015 to 17th place by the beginning of December. Being a serial runners-up just doesn’t cut it in modern football.

Spurs’ decline isn’t anything near as bad as Mourinho's final denouement at Chelsea, but you’d have thought that going from a Champions League final in June to midway of the bottom half of the Premier League in November is hardly conducive to support from Daniel Levy, the Tottenham chairman. Rumours have swirled in recent weeks of Pochettino becoming progressively detached from his squad. It’s hard to judge whether this was simply the Argentinian running out of enthusiasm for a “project”, to use modern managerial parlance, that had, over five and a half years, seen him preside over Harry Kane’s progress as one of England’s best-ever strikers, the development of Dele Alli - as objectionable an individual as he might be - to be a forward of some lethality, along with the evolution of Dier, Eriksen, Walker and Son as players of great potency. It’s just there hasn’t been any product from it. Too many Spurs players have gone missing at vital moments. Too often the team has gone Spursy.

So, when considering the lack of any silverware to line the trophy room at Tottenham’s lavish new stadium in N17, it makes obvious sense to look at Mourinho, even more so than apparent left-field candidates like Eddie Howe, the star-on-the-rise Brendan Rodgers, or the experienced Carlo Ancelotti, who’d apparently hinted at throwing his hat in, should the Spurs job come available. It is, perhaps, too easy to point directly at an empty trophy cabinet and blame that for Pochettino’s frustration and subsequent departure. But there’s no doubting where Levy was coming from when he declared that: "In José we have one of the most successful managers in football" - 25 trophies spanning seven clubs is not a stat to be ignored. How he acquired those trophies is another matter.

When he was appointed as Chelsea head coach for the first time, Mourinho had just won the Champions League with Porto in 2004. In between his first and second spells at Stamford Bridge, he won a league/cup/Champions League treble with Inter in 2010 and led Real Madrid to the La Liga title in 2012. Back at Chelsea, he won the Premier League, again. None of these achievements have been without their strife, and when Mourinho took over what had been pitched as his ‘dream job’, Manchester United, the dystopian spiral only continued.

Picture: Tottenham Hotspur

Which makes his appointment to Tottenham, while undoubted box office news, questionable. Yes, by reputation, he may bring Spurs closer to silverware than at any time since their last trophy, the League Cup in 2008. But this is assuming that Levy is prepared to bankroll the programme. Mourinho is already rumoured to be earning double Pochettino’s weekly salary, which means someone - presumably José’s agent - has managed to prise open Levy’s wallet wider than it had been previously known to hinge. And, as previous proprietors have found, Mourinho will want money to buy in Europe’s most expensive talents, a move likely to make Spurs’ accountants as nervous as the youngsters Pochettino blooded through, even if not to ultimate success. For his part, Pochettino was already harrumphing back in the summer about his lack of influence over club decisions in areas like player acquisition (the club failed to buy anyone new for two successive windows). Compare this with the £89 million Mourinho persuaded Ed Woodward to pay for Paul Pogba, or the £75 million for Lukaku. And look where that got him. It may be wise to stock up on popcorn before the January window opens.

Whatever happens, things around Tottenham Hotspur are unlikely to be dull for the next three seasons (the typical length of a Mourinho managerial cycle). One of football’s more enigmatic managers is now in charge of one of football’s more enigmatic clubs. Where this prospect might fall down is, crucially, on the field of play. Will Tottenham’s young stars, who have at least been afforded the freedom to be creative under Pochettino, adapt to Mourinho’s notorious brand of pragmatic football? We Chelsea fans put up with five-and-a-half seasons of jeers and jibes about parked buses, criticism that never abated as the silverware rolled in. In fact, it only increased, and it’s only now under Frank Lampard’s stewardship of youth that neutrals and the occasional rival are beginning to say nice things about the club. Not wishing to curse the coming months at, arguably, our bitterest London rival, I do wonder just what the José Effect will be. And just how much Arsenal fans might be breathing easier right now.