Will AVB ever get lauded like Laudrup?
Michael Laudrup is the best former footballer managing in the league; a superstar who played for Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventus. Andre Villas-Boas was... very good at Championship Manager.
The game has become more corporatised and technical but Villas-Boas is still a kind of interloper in Laudrup’s world. Management continues to be dominated by former players. It helps to have been a good former player: seven of the 20 Premier League managers played international football. Only three of the 20 did not have a professional playing career, and of those three, Rafael Benitez and Brendan Rodgers could argue that they would have done but for the serious knee injuries that finished their careers before they could get started.
Villas-Boas is the only pure civilian currently managing at the top level of the English game.
He’s not the first civilian to make it to this level — he owes some of his success to his part in the rise of Jose Mourinho, who also never played football for money. But his kind is still rare at the top.
It’s easy to mock Villas-Boas because he’s so intense and preoccupied, he speaks in long jargon-laden sentences, he often stands there absent-mindedly smelling his fingers, and so on. Yet you also have to admire the accomplishment and self-belief of a young nobody who, without any of the movie-star charisma of Jose Mourinho, has turned himself into somebody who competes with football princes like Laudrup and Roberto Mancini.
Maybe his jittery intensity owes something to the precariousness of his position. His success or failure at Spurs will determine whether English football remembers Villas-Boas as a genius or a dork. Regardless of that Europa League win with Porto, his career in the big leagues could still go either way.
Laudrup, on the other hand, knows he’ll always be Michael Laudrup. It’s not that past glories bring consolation for current failures — not that Laudrup is failing; he’s been an instant success with Swansea. It’s that people who know football will always be paying attention when Michael Laudrup is in the room. When they stand on the sideline watching their teams play, Villas-Boas knows that the results will make or break him, while Laudrup knows that his reputation is already made.
And so on Sunday at White Hart Lane, Villas-Boas paced and fretted while Laudrup strolled about looking cool, the pattern only breaking in the last five minutes when Hugo Lloris appeared to knock Michu out cold while punching the ball clear out of the area.
Spurs stormed up the field on a counter-attack as chaos erupted in the technical area, Laudrup berating the officials while Villas-Boas advanced onto the pitch in what later transpired was an attempt to get the referee to stop the game.
“I thought ‘fucking hell, he’s unconscious’ or whatever,” Laudrup said later. “You can’t fake a reaction like that. it’s not like if somebody kicks you and you’re watching the referee like this [he clutches his face and peeps through his fingers]. This is completely different. I mean, when I saw it, I still remember in ’82, Battiston, and he was lying with his finger like that... [he extends his finger to point straight out from his chest].”
Of Villas-Boas’ sortie onto the field, Laudrup said only: “I have to admit, I never do that.” The former player knows the manager doesn’t belong on the pitch, while the man who has only ever been a coach doesn’t see why he shouldn’t go out there and try to affect what is happening.
Villas-Boas came in to his post-match press conference already having reviewed the match statistics, pointing out that Spurs had more possession and 23 shots. You get the sense that to him the match is not quite real until its numerical dimensions have crystallised. It was no surprise to Villas-Boas that Spurs’ winning goal came from a dead ball situation because “we knew Swansea were a team that conceded a lot from set-pieces”.
Laudrup did not quote any statistics. “You know with statistics,” he said in response to a question about whether he had been aware of Spurs’ habit of conceding late goals. “You can ... look at them. But everything went upside down today. They did not concede.”
Villas-Boas said Spurs had worked to eliminate that unfortunate habit by “stimulating concentration in the last parts of training”. When asked to explain what that meant, he giggled with apparent delight. “We do it by increasing complexity in terms of the exercises, so the more complex the exercise the more concentrated you have to be. I increase the tasks they have to do in the exercises, you have to be very, very creative.”
He did not give any further details but a man who has been coaching since the age of 21 has probably come up with some pretty brilliant drills. We don’t know whether Swansea’s players are subjected to training drills this creative. The young Michael Laudrup had other outlets for his creativity and the results can be seen on YouTube by anyone who types Barcelona Laudrup or Real Madrid Laudrup or Denmark Michael Laudrup. Villas-Boas might one day become a Laudrup of the dugout. You wonder if the world will ever respect him for it like it respects the real thing.
