Spurs hope to gain from AVB’s bitter Bridge experience

So, will the real Andre Villas-Boas please stand up?

As the Portuguese takes over at Spurs, he does so with one of the starker question marks in football trailing his name.

Few managers of top clubs can claim such a wildly mixed heritage, a serial winner in the course of one unbeatable year in Portugal who saw his soaring reputation crash and burn in just eight months in England. That Spurs chairman Daniel Levy has decided he’s the man to replace the popular and successful Harry Redknapp might represent, as one report has already put it, a “remarkable turnaround in fortunes” for Villas-Boas but, after his experience at Stamford Bridge — and indeed, old ’Arry’s at White Hart Lane — he will need no reminding that, in football, a gaffer’s job can be lost as easily as it is won. Only the coming months will tell us if the AVB resurrection is the real deal.