The players will be expected to sweat blood, to give every ounce of themselves to a master-plan drilled and drilled again on the training ground.Ĭonte will spend hundreds of hours working on team shape, on and off the ball.
The speed of Chelsea’s revival (after Mourinho, no less, which may well have been in Spurs’ thinking) is testament to the astonishing work-rate, leadership, and tactical intelligence of Tottenham’s new manager.
The reason 2016 is the starting point is because this is the year Klopp’s vision at Liverpool started to come together, Guardiola joined Manchester City – and Conte blew the Premier League away at Chelsea. What separates Nuno and Mourinho from Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola is increasingly understood instinctively by fans and pundits, hence why everyone these days is talking about ‘having a plan’. Since 2016 the Premier League has led the way in the tactical revolution of the sport by collecting the game’s best coaches, all of whom prescribe to a style of structured possession football that applies painstaking detail to every pass and every move.Īs time goes on, the divide between those who can coach what to do on the ball with ludicrous precision and those who cannot becomes ever starker. Well, maybe Spurs have their miracle, because appointing Antonio Conte – surely among the top five managers in the world – is an extraordinary coup. It would have taken something miraculous to succeed in that environment. He was hamstrung from the outset by a club already in crisis mode, their chairman under pressure following the disaster of the Mourinho era and the Harry Kane debacle. You can’t average 51.8 per cent possession and expect to play on the break. Or in other words, you can’t manage a big club with a small-club mentality. No, Nuno’s issue was attempting to do this at a club that demands expansive football and that is expected to hog the ball. Only Norwich City have scored fewer goals.īut the problem of chance creation isn’t purely about deploying a foggy system without much positional detail plenty of teams sit deep and deploy hard-hitting direct attacking football with moderate success. Tottenham have taken the joint-fewest shots in the Premier League (10.3 per game). Like Mourinho, his philosophy has no place at the top of the game anymore. Like Mourinho, he expects his players to improvise their football and form natural partnerships on the break. He is educated in the reactive, counterattacking school of football that puts defensive shape first and possession a distant second. Nuno cannot help being the manager he is, cannot change his spots.
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