Thoughts on AVB

[StartingPrice]

I love how these threads become a war. Lines are divided and people want to rip each others throats out.

Harry did good and bad, so has avb. No-one is a saint. But we are all spurs supporters. Cheer when we win, cry when we los3.

Feck you you pro/anti AVB You are on t'other side of t'line...and I want to rip yer throat out

And in other news: Muller, 0-2 HE AIN'T PRETTY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Blackcanary]

From an article on The Mirror (!) here:

A word about Andre Villas-Boas. He attended a charity concert in Newcastle this week in memory of his former mentor the late Sir Bobby Robson. All those attended were blown away by how humble and classy the Spurs boss was all night. He had time for everyone and acknowledged his debt to Robson.

Well done AVB.

Winning them over, one region at a time...

 

[StartingPrice]

From an article on The Mirror (!) here:



Winning them over, one region at a time...

You mean, like, he has a cunning plan?

AVB is Tony Robinson

 

[Blackcanary]

You mean, like, he has a cunning plan?

AVB is Tony Robinson

Haha!

"As cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?"

 

[StartingPrice]

He twists and turns like...a twisty, turny thing

 

[Huddlestone22]

but that can't be true because he was mean to all the real footballing heroes like Terry, Lampard and Cole .

Honestly AVB just seems like a genuinely nice guy who was given far too much stick for his run as Chelsea boss and the start of his Spurs career.

 

[razz]

I have a theory. Unfortunately, it's not a theory based on facts but solely on my own observations. These observations might be incorrect. In fact, they might be entirely incorrect. Or spot on.

Anyway, my theory is that AVB doesn't care much about the first 45+ minutes of a game. They are just a means of getting to the last 45+ minutes, when the game can really be won or lost. So, he tells the team to go out in the first half, play it simple, don't use too much energy and make sure that at half-time we're level or within a goal of the opposition. Then, in the second half, the real work begins. That's also when the most passionate celebrations are made. A goal in the first half is met by a clapping of the hands or a slightly immensely gay tapping of the knees. Second half goals, however, are celebrated as masculine as celebrations come.

So, I'm no longer bothered about watching the first half of our games. Nor am I bothered about reading the half-time comments on here (where it would seem that we are scrapping it with QPR at the bottom of the table). It's the second half that matters. I am convinced this is a tactic used uniquely by AVB.

I'll back it up with one stat: We are 11th in the 1st half table (stat taken from a website, could be accurate or could be bull).

Thank you.

 

[ackie]

My thought on AVB - He's doing a great job so far and its his first season. Support the man and his players!
We have sold two of the most creative players and have new players and managers + we had injuries.
He has done the best he can with what he got and he has done excellent so far. We have also stopped leaking late goals.
So get behind AVB and the team...He is the Manager. If you think you know better in terms of tactics and buying/selling players, then next time make an application to be the gaffer at Spurs.

 

[parklane1]

My thought on AVB - He's doing a great job so far and its his first season. Support the man and his players!
We have sold two of the most creative players and have new players and managers + we had injuries.
He has done the best he can with what he got and he has done excellent so far. We have also stopped leaking late goals.
So get behind AVB and the team...He is the Manager. If you think you know better in terms of tactics and buying/selling players, then next time make an application to be the gaffer at Spurs.

Well there would be plenty of X-Box players who think they could do just that

 

[RichSpur58]

Good article below.

Here is a football obsessive whose geeky adolescent fantasies of managing a football club were realised by a chance encounter with Sir Bobby Robson, the manager of Porto, the club he had supported from the moment he knew what a football club was.
He started doing his coaching badges before most boys of his age had done their A-Levels and was running the British Virgin Islands national team when most his school-mates were graduating from university.
Here is a the privately-educated son of a professor and a descendent of nobility more than holding his own in the grimy world of football. He went from being Robson's protege to Mourinho's spy and has always pushed those around him to match his ambitions: he wants everything fast, including his cars. Chelsea will have to keep up. He doesn't want to grow old in the job, planning to use his career to take him round the world: to Japan, Chile and Argentina.
He might be just 33 but he's crammed a lot into his first three decades. Mourinho once said "it has taken me 15 years to be an overnight success". Apposite in Villas-Boas' case too. There is little that is ordinary about him except, perhaps, his goalkeeping.
Family background
Villas-Boas was born in Porto in 1977 into an upper-middle class family who lived in the upmarket neighbourhood running off Avenida Boavista. His father, Professor Luis Filipe, is a chemical engineer who had begun his studies in Portugal before moving to England to do his PhD at in the chemistry faculty of the University of Kent in Canterbury. He now sits on the chemical engineering faculty of the Technical University of Lisbon and works for a company that provides hi-tech aluminium car parts for Volkswagen, Audi, Seat and Skoda. Luis Filipe married Theresa, Andre’s mother, in 1973. She runs her own business, with a number of clothing shops in Porto.
Villas Boas grew up in this affluent family, with two sisters and a brother, and fraternised with the social elite of the city. He attended the prestigious Colegio do Roasario, one of the most expensive private schools in the city and with a reputation for academic excellence. The school had originally been known as the English School, run by Sister Margaret Hennessey, an Irish nun and other members of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. The school’s existence was threatened when the state purged religious schools at the beginning of the last century but the nuns kept it going and, while the school is run by a secular board today, the nuns are still in residence.
“He was a polite, affable student but while he was bright he did not study that hard because what really fascinated him was football,” said Jose Eiro, the head of the PE department.
He was obsessed with sport. He was a member of the exclusive English Club, where expats would go to play cricket, polo and tennis, and used their facilities to play squash.
The noble ancestry
Villas-Boas’ paternal great-great-grandfather Jose Joaquim Villas-Boas (1825-1906) was the Baron of Paco de Vieira, an area near Guimaraes north of Porto, and a judge on the Supreme Justice Tribunal. He was also a the civil governor of Braga. His son and Villas-Boas’ great grandfather Jose Gerardo (1863-1913) became the first viscount of Guidhomil, up near the border with Spain. His brother, and Villas-Boas’ great-uncle Alfredo (1860-1926), was the Count of Paco de Vieira, a judge and an influential figure in Portuguese politics under Prime Minister Ernesto Hintze Ribeiro at the turn of the century, working as the minister for Public Works, Commerce and Industry and as the civil governor of Ponta Delgada in the Azores. There is a road named after him in Guimaraes.
Villas-Boas’ grandfather, Goncalo, married an Englishwoman, Margaret Neville Kendall. Her mother’s family, the Burns, were from Lancashire and Merseyside but her father’s family, the Kendalls, had been in Portugal for at least four generations and were most likely connected with the port wine industry (although her grandfather had apparently been the Consul for Chile in Porto). Margaret’s brother Douglas, an Oxford University alumnus, was an RAF wing commander and was awarded an OBE.
The football fanatic
Villas-Boas was enrolled as a member of FC Porto on July 4, 1980, just before his third birthday. It was a prescient move on his parents’ part; he would become a passionate fan of the club. At nine he was part of the family celebrations as they watched Porto beat Bayern Munich in the 1987 European Cup final and he joined a football club called Ribeirense, based in the centre of Porto and the favourite club of the fanatical supporters’ groups. It was there that he first met Fernando ‘Macaco’ Madureira, who went on to become the leader of the Superdragoes, the most influential Porto ultras.
Football consumed him. He started on the ‘gateway drugs’ football magazines and Panini stickers before slipping down the slope into full-blown Championship Manager addiction. This computer game, with its endless statistics, simulated being a football manager and destroyed the social lives of a generation of football geeks.
Villas-Boas was hooked. He used to carry notebooks around with him, in which he scribbled tactical ideas and stats about players and every Monday, the normally reserved ‘Cenourinho’ (Baby Carrot, because of his red hair) would debate with his friends the weekend’s games. “I remember for one school project he handed in an exhaustive report on Porto and their tactics and substitutions with lots of statistics,” said Eiro, his PE teacher.
The footballer
Villas-Boas wanted to play, too. There was a good amateur club near his school called Ramaldense. It was run from a small bar in the neighbourhood and, unlike most clubs, had their own pitch in the city centre, although now, because of financial problems, it lies fallow and is overgrown with weeds. Humberto Coelho, the famous Benfica and Portugal defender, had played for them but when Villas-Boas and a few of his friends joined, the club was struggling. With the first team threatened with relegation from the city amateur league, they hired ‘Spanish’ Quim to coach.
“They wanted me to try to save the club because they were second from bottom,” Quim said. “I needed better players so I went to watch the Under 19 team. There were three players I thought were good for the first team, including a small but aggressive defensive midfield player — that was Villas Boas.
“He had come to the club at 15 from Ribeirense where he had been a goalkeeper. He was not that good in goal so was normally on the bench and would only play three or four games a season. He played one year in goal for Ramaldense then switched to outfield but he would always want to play in goal during training.
“At 18 he was not very big but he was a good player for us. I remember he would always get the ball and then pass to our right forward, Costa. That was how he played. He knew he was not good enough to turn professional, though.” After leaving Ramaldense he moved to Marechel Gomes de Costa, named after an upmarket boulevard in the town, a bit like the Kings’ Road in London. “We were all boys from the same social background who loved football,” explained Pedro Barros, 35, and the club captain. “It as always been quite informal — our office is in the boot of the president’s car. The team has engineers, doctors and students and it was as much about the social side as playing.” He points to the motto on his club T-shirt: “You’ll never drink alone”.
“Andre joined us in 1998 when I was at university. We hadn’t gone to the same school but had mutual friends and I knew him from playing squash against him at the English club.
“He was a good player, not a big guy but wiry, strong and had no fear. We did not play on grass but on earth pitches so tackling was not so easy. He had great stamina. He talked a lot on the pitch – he was already working for Porto by then — and he always took up good tactical positions. He had to quit at the end of the 1998-99 season though because he had more and more work with Porto and he could not get his Saturdays free.”
The crucial meeting
Villas-Boas got his big break in 1994. He was 16 and was living with his parents in what was then new apartment block on Rua Tenente Valadim. Sir Bobby Robson and his wife Elsie lived in the same building. As a fanatical Porto fan, Villas-Boas could not help but confront the manager of his club when he bumped into him, wanting to know why he was not playing the striker Domingos Paciencia (as Braga manager, Villas-Boas’ opposite number in the Europa League final). Sir Bobby obviously liked the boy’s chutzpah and asked him to leave a report in his letterbox. He liked what he read so he asked Villas-Boas to keep writing them for him. He started to take his protégé down to training occasionally to show him how it all worked.
Robson started taking Villas-Boas with him when he went down to Foz, the area of upmarket bars and restaurants at the mouth of the river Douro. Over a meal or coffee, Robson would talk football with his coaching staff and it was there that Villas-Boas first came across Robson’s outspoken interpreter, Jose Mourinho.
After winning the Europa League final in Dublin last season, Villas-Boas made a point of thanking Sir Bobby, grateful for the generosity his mentor had shown. Not only did Robson formalise Villas-Boas’s work by telling Porto to take him on as a youth coach but he also helped him to start getting his coaching badges, persuading the Football Association to let him on to a Lilleshall course even though he was still only 17. He even set him up with a placement at his old club Ipswich Town.
“Sir Bobby phoned me and asked if I could have Andre over and let him watch training and show him how the club worked for a few weeks,” said George Burley, the manager at the time. “He was very enthusiastic and wanted to know everything, especially about tactics. He obviously listened a lot to Bobby and you could tell he’d had a big influence on him. People compare him to Jose Mourinho and there are things about him that are similar but in terms of his love of very attacking football, well that philosophy came from Bobby. If he can combine the organisation of Mourinho and the enthusiasm of Bobby then he will be very good indeed.”
A Scottish Education
Like his siblings and most of his school-friends, Villas-Boas had planned to go to university, and had ambitions of becoming a sports journalist. Then he thought about doing a degree that could help get a job with a club, like Mourinho had done. After meeting Robson, those plans began to change. He plunged straight into getting his coaching licenses, attending courses at the Inverclyde National Sports Centre in Largs.
“Andre first came to us in 1994 was with us here for over 14 years,” said Jim Fleeting, the SFA director of football development. “He did his C, B, A and Pro License with us and was very studious, very dedicated. It must have been daunting coming to a foreign country and being younger than your classmates but he sailed through the courses.
I remember he used to read everything he could get his hands on, books on psychology, physiology.
“He did his Pro License with a great group: Ally McCoist, Ian Durrant, Owen Coyle, Andy Milne and Craig Brewster. They had a great team spirit and he really held his own. He has strong opinions but is always very respectful.
“He finished his Pro License in 2008 and the following year I asked him to come back and give a presentation to the students. He did a club study and a tactical analysis of an international between Scotland and Georgia. I still use his work as an example to present students.”
Caribbean adventure
Villas-Boas wanted to put some of his theories into practice and took the first opportunity, becoming technical director of the British Virgin Islands. “We want to recruit a young coach with the right qualifications,” said Kenrick Grant, who ran the football association.
“He sent us his CV and, coming from a great club like Porto and being a friend of Bobby Robson, we were convinced.
“When he first arrived he was always on the beach, like he was on holiday! But when he started to work he surprised me. He made a plan for all the teams, youth to senior, and had a manual with tactics and training plans, full of information. He was great with computers too.
He started with the youth team and then wanted to train the seniors.
He got some of them coaching the younger players who went on to become internationals so he left a mark. I had an idea about his age but I wasn’t sure.” The association found out that he was 22 only when he left. He had to collaborate with the manager at the time of selection and he wanted complete control, so he returned to Portugal.
Porto Part 1
When Villas-Boas came back from the Caribbean, things began to change quickly. He started working with the Porto youth team again and, in 2002, Mourinho replaced Octavio Machado as manager. “Mourinho asked me if he could ask Andre to work for him and I said ‘of course, no problem’,” said Ilidio Vale, who ran the Porto academy and now coaches the Portugal Under 20 team. “We knew that he had qualities, that he was ambitious.” He started working for Mourinho on a part-time basis for the end of that season and then took the job full time for 2002-03 season, in which Porto won the league and the Uefa Cup. His scouting reports were famously detailed, sometimes taking four days to compile.
He would go undercover to opposition training grounds to judge the mood of the players and assess their fitness before compiling his dossiers and compiling footage on DVDs. Mourinho would call him his “eyes and ears” and took him to Chelsea when he moved there in 2004 and, initially, to Internazionale before Villas-Boas, frustrated at not being given more responsibility went out alone.
Academica
After Villas-Boas stopped working with Mourinho the relationship cooled and he said publicly this season that they no longer speak. He took a risk joining Academica Coimbra in 2009 because they were threatened with relegation but he managed to get them into mid-table.
The club took a chance, too, of course. “Yes it was a risk, but a calculated risk,” said technical director Luis Agostinho. “Through Jose Mourinho we had all the background of his qualities and skills since he first started working for Porto. He was a strong leader who had an excellent training methodology and with a talent for reading matches. You could quickly see he was talented and Sporting Lisbon twice tried to sign him before he went to Porto.” Being younger than some of his players, you might have expected him to keep his distance but he forged close bonds with his players. “His age was never a problem,” said Pedrinho, who played right-back. “Outside of training he was more like a friend, always wanting to know about your family. Another thing that impressed the players was that he was always first to text you or call you if you got injured. If a player went into hospital for an operation, he would be the first visitor. He cared.”
When he left for Porto he sent a text message to every player in the squad which read: “I’m leaving you for a new adventure. I thank you for what we did together. Each one of you has made their mark on me at the start of my career and all in different and special ways.”
His lieutenants
Villas-Boas is bringing two trusted colleagues with him to Chelsea.
Jose Mario Rocha, his fitness trainer, is someone he knows from his time coaching the Porto youth teams while Daniel Sousa does the job — opposition scout — which he himself used to do for Jose Mourinho.
Sousa studied at the Faculty of Sports at the University of Porto under Jose Guilherme, the Professor of Football, who was Villas-Boas’s assistant at Academica. As part of his final-year thesis Sousa interviewed Villas-Boas about strategies for attacking football. A year later Villas-Boas asked the professor who his best student was and he recommended Sousa.
Need for speed
Outside of football Villas-Boas is a big motorsport fan and in March he was invited by FIA vice-president Carlos Barbosa and the Ford M-Sport team to race on one of the stages the day before the Portuguese round of the World Rally Championship in the Algarve. He sat as co-pilot to Matthew Wilson around a 3km test-loop at Loule. “I had no idea what to expect but the speed was just unbelievable,” he said.
Villas-Boas also attended the Monaco Grand Prix this year and enjoys driving his own cars at speed on the mountain roads of Valongo near Porto. He has driven a BMW Z4 and an M5 and these days drives a special version of the Fiat 500 Abarth
Privacy
Despite his privileged background, Villas-Boas has a reputation for being down-to-earth, polite and approachable. He does, though, closely guard the privacy of his family. He no longer gives one-on-one interviews, instead taking after Marcelo Bielsa and Pep Guardiola in giving long press conferences in which he will answer any question put to him. He very rarely appears at public functions with his wife Joana, who studied interior design at Chelsea College of Art, and, since they were married in 2004, they kept well away from Portugal’s lifestyle magazines. The couple lived with their two young daughters in a modern apartment block very close to where he grew up.
His fame, though, is beginning to impinge on his privacy — the first biography — unauthorised, naturally — is about to be published in Portugal.

 

[theShiznit]

Yeah great article.

Just a shame you need to go to IMAX cinema to read it...

 

[Shadydan]

Took 27 games to be sacked by Chelsea last season...

Took 27 games to overtake them this season...

AVB

 

[ackie]

Credit & Applause to AVB. We use to leak late goals and now we are scoring late winners!
He must be doing some things very very right!

 

[fazza]

Chelsea's loss is Tottenham's gain, You can see how respected he is by the players, just look at tonights celebrations, Like a Boas!!

 

[spurs4europe]

In addition to implementing a structure that has made us very hard to beat, we can also add that AVB has added a never-say-die attitude that means the players really do now fight until the very last second.

Loved the celebration for that last goal!

 

[talkshowhost86]

It's starting to look like we've really done well to appoint AVB.

Obviously it's too early to get very excited as he needs to see the job through with regards to finishing in the top 4, but what he's done so far has been exceptional.

He's taken a squad shorn of its two most creative players and its captain, and rife with injuries to key players and got them above teams with more money to spend on transfer fees (Liverpool), more money to spend on wages (Arsenal) and more money to spend on everything (Chelsea).

Some may say we're over-reliant on Bale, but AVB seems to have got more out of him than anyone previously and that in itself is an excellent sign.

I really hope that he sees the next 10 or so games through with the same success, as if he's backed with money whilst we're in the Champions League, the sky really could be the limit.

 

[Flashspur]

Christ we've got one of the best coaches in the world and one of the best players - who would have thought? Now we have to hold on to both of them!

 

[AnotherSpursFan]

Introduced Sidgursson and Tom Carroll into the game.
Genius!!

 

[Mattspur]

From an article on The Mirror (!) here:



Winning them over, one region at a time...

Just like the Tory party

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/sep/12/david-cameron-hillsborough-report-statement

 

[Dembele'Disciple]

it's all Gareth Bale. What exactly did AVB do? This is madness. Play so poorly and the coach gets the praise because he has a player who's dragging the team to victory time after time? Madness I tell ya, madness.