Minasyan transforms pretenders into real contenders

WHEN viewed from a certain perspective, Armenia don’t appear to meet any of the requirements for success in international football.

Completely devoid of any pedigree, almost all of their players turn out for either middling Ukrainian clubs or remain in the Armenian top division. Most of all, in a climate where Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger feel international management is best suited to experienced, elder statesmen such as Giovanni Trapattoni, their coach is a 37-year-old novice.

But then manager Vardan Minasyan is a perfect illustration of how the parameters of international football are changing.

With the unprecedented rise of an exciting Armenian team, much has been made of the emergence of a very talented group of young players in the country. But, as ever with such sides, a lot of their progress can be put down to the extent of trust the manager placed in them.

On taking over the job properly in 2009 after serving as assistant for three years, Minasyan wasn’t afraid to introduce a core of young players en masse and – unlike so many international teams – develop them as a cohesive group.

Hardly surprisingly given that trust in youth, Minasyan cites Barcelona and Arsenal as his main influences. And that also comes across in the team’s fluid 4-2-3-1 formation which favours attack, pace and passing. Only Spain, Germany, Hungary, Holland and Sweden have hit more goals than his team in Euro 2012 and Armenia have scored in every away game.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Minasyan combines all of that with the kind of obsessive attention to detail Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho would admire.

When Armenia won so handsomely in Zilina, for example, there were a lot of assumptions that the unlikely four goals came from Slovakia throwing men forward. In reality, though, Minasyan had spent hours working out exactly how and where to hurt them. The 4-0 win was thoroughly forensic.

“We carefully prepared for this match,” Minasyan said, “studying the strengths and weakness of Slovakia.”

In that, it’s also possible the humble careers of the Armenian squad may greatly aid Minasyan. Every month, he organises a three-day training camp with the home-based players in order to deepen their integration and education.

And Minasyan’s own day job also helps here too. A former all-action midfielder for Armenian champions FC Pyunik, he has managed the club since 2008 and continued a run of successive league titles that could stretch to 11 this year.

The only caveat here, though, is that Minasyan’s club tenure also provides the only failure in his short managerial career so far. In three years, he has never even won a European match, let alone a tie. Most recently, Pyunik got hammered 9-1 on aggregate by Viktoria Plzen and have otherwise been knocked out by Anorthosis Famagusta, Dinamo Zagreb and Partizan Belgrade.

Indeed, the last European tie they won came in 2007. And the opponents? Ireland’s Derry City.

Minasyan was only an assistant at the club then. But the hope for Ireland is that he won’t be further emboldened by the memories.