Chelsea Sack Conte - Sarri To Take Over

[Rousseau 10,489]

 

[Uilleam 5,919]

Sarri is an interesting character, with an unusual route to the top, and a reputation for rigidity. 

 

Marcotti and Bandini offer their thoughts:

 

Chain-smoking former banker Maurizio Sarri knows best XI

Gabriele Marcotti, European Football Correspondent

 

July 13 2018, 12:01am, The Times

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/chain-smoking-former-banker-maurizio-sarri-knows-best-xi-dsd929336

 

Sarri’s teams play a fast, flamboyant brand of footballCIRO DE LUCA/REUTERSShare

 

Maurizio Sarri’s story ought to be an inspiration to any failed professional footballer who toils away in the non-League game, juggling a full-time job, a family and an impossible dream that they just cannot shake. It was not until his late 30s, when he started to win promotions into the higher reaches of Italian non-League football, that he was seen as something other than a chain-smoking eccentric banker with deep rings under his eyes from lack of sleep.

He is not the first Premier League manager to have had a “real job” and he is not the first to have done it without having played professionally. But he may be the first to have done both while ascending to this level from the very lowest rung of Sunday-league football.

 

His background and driven nature made him an outsider in Italy’s football fraternity. It is no coincidence that, after leading little Empoli back to Serie A and then helping them to avoid relegation, his big break came courtesy of another nonconformist, Aurelio de Laurentiis, the Napoli president. In his three seasons in Naples, the club finished second twice and third once while, more importantly, winning plaudits for his style of play, based on pressing, possession and movement.

That is the sort of football you would imagine he will try to bring to Chelsea, though it is likely that he will have to adapt his methods to the Premier League. Many of his training sessions are based on endless repetition, so that players get the co-ordination and timing essential to his game. Sarri tends to do this at a high pace, to ensure his sessions do not run for hours and to stop players getting bored. To an outsider, it can appear chaotic and it can take players a while to adapt to his training regime.

 

That emphasis on chemistry and repetition allows his players to pass the ball confidently into space, knowing a team-mate will be there or on his way. This has, however, been one of the main sources of criticism, and it helped lead to his falling out with De Laurentiis. So intense is his work with the first XI and, at most, two or three substitutes, to achieve his balletically choreographed brand of football, that squad management becomes an issue.

At Napoli he worked out his first-choice XI at the start of the campaign and did not deviate from it, except for replacing left back Faouzi Ghoulam with Mário Rui when the former was out for the season. Unhappy players on the bench simply felt left out.

 

This could be an issue at Stamford Bridge, where there are bigger names on the bench. What’s more, as he works so much with the first XI, when a player is absent, the drop-off in performance can be stark.

When Sarri does rotate, he tends to change the entire line-up, delineating the gulf between starters and substitutes. He was criticised for playing a weakened side away to Shakhtar Donetsk in last season’s Champions League and he did the same at home to RB Leipzig in the Europa League, a competition that De Laurentiis and fans believed they could have won. That said, Napoli finished just four points behind Juventus in the league; their total of 91 points was one of the highest in the history of Italian football.

 

Off the pitch, while avoiding politics, Sarri leans decidedly to the left: his grandfather fought in the partisan resistance during the Second World War. When he hears how tough footballers have it these days, he says: “A tough life is getting up at six every morning and going to work in a factory assembly line, not this one.” He enjoyed banking but coaching is “the only job I would contemplate doing for free”.

He may have built a reputation as a tactical savant but recently he said that he was less obsessed with formations and movements than he once was, mainly because at some point it becomes counterproductive.

“I’ve come to realise that there’s a child in every footballer, a child who is playing a game,” he said. “That’s where the fun part is. And when players are having fun, they are more productive. Tactical rigour is important but we must never lose sight of the game and making sure the child inside is enjoying himself.”

If he can get that message across to a Chelsea dressing room that has had its ups and downs in the past 12 months, and if he can impose his flamboyant brand of football, then they will do just fine.

 

Will former banker Maurizio Sarri reap dividends for Chelsea?

The new coach at Stamford Bridge rarely surprised anyone with his tactics at Napoli, yet they often swept opponents aside

Paolo Bandini

Fri 13 Jul 2018 09.54 BSTLast modified on Fri 13 Jul 2018 09.59 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jul/13/former-banker-maurizio-sarri-reap-dividends-chelsea

 

At last, Chelsea can see “a fumata bianca”. In the lexicon of Italian football journalism, that phrase – “white smoke” – is used to convey the moment when a drawn-out coaching appointment or transfer saga reaches its conclusion. The imagery is borrowed from the Vatican, where ballots are burned to let the world know when a new Pope has been elected. In this case, the smoe might simply be rising from the end of Maurizio Sarri’s latest cigarette.

To say that Chelsea’s new manager is fond of a puff might be understating things. Dries Mertens estimated Sarri’s daily consumption at five packets a day. The manager is almost as keen on his coffee. At Napoli, he would have the club’s shopkeeper bring him a fresh espresso out at set breaks in training every day.

Antonio Conte’s exit suited him and Chelsea but flattered neither

 

Routines matter to Sarri: in part because he is a superstitious individual. Mertens observed in another interview that Napoli would swap back and forth between specific different training pitches every day, changing the schedule only whenever a winning run came to an end.

More than that, though, Sarri is a man who sees strength in consistency. Napoli have rarely surprised anyone with their tactical approach over the last three years, lining up every week in the same 4-3-3, and yet they have swept opponents aside with a dazzling brand of football.

Arrigo Sacchi, who forged one of the greatest sides in European history at Milan in the late 1980s, has hailed Sarri as a “master” and his team as a “godsend”. They share a footballing philosophy, creating sides that are compact and seek to dominate possession. And they share the fact of never having played the game professionally as well.

 

From his 20s right through to his 40s, Sarri’s day job was at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, where he specialised in interbank finance. Coaching was something that he did in his spare time, for the love of the game.

Even now, he struggles to frame football as a job. “When I go to lead a training session I never say to my family: ‘I’m going to work,’” he told the newspaper Avvenire. “I come from a family of labourers, and if I hear someone talking about ‘sacrifices’ in football, I get mad.”

The contrast between his background and that of his predecessor at Chelsea is too obvious to ignore. Antonio Conte was a European Cup winner and five-time Serie A champion with Juventus as a player even before he led the Bianconeri to three further domestic titles from the bench. Sarri arrives in west London having never won a major piece of silverware.

What he did do, in Naples, was create a team that challenged for the title on a wage budget barely half the size of Juventus’s. The team he inherited at Napoli had finished fifth under Rafa Benítez in 2014-15. Under Sarri, the Partenopei finished second, then third before last season becoming the first club to fail to win Serie A despite breaking the 90-point barrier.

 

He did all this despite having the division’s top scorer, Gonzalo Higuaín, signed by Juventus in the summer of 2016, and then seeing the player brought to replace the Argentinian, Arkadiusz Milik, tear his cruciate ligament weeks into the new season. Lacking a true No 9, Sarri reimagined Dries Mertens as a centre-forward. Napoli finished that campaign with 94 Serie A goals.

 

And yet, for all he is reputed as an attacking coach, the greatest gains achieved in Naples might have been at the other end of the pitch. Napoli had conceded 54 goals in the league during their final season under Benítez. Under Sarri the figure has dipped to 32, 39, then 29. “Balance is the secret for every team,” he insisted in an interview with Il Mattino. “There cannot be a defensive formation and an attacking formation: such a concept is a limitation. The attacking capacity of a team is the fruit of the work of the manager and of the quality of the players.”

 

As any coach, Sarri has his flaws. He has been accused in Italy of being too rigid: his almost ideological refusal to diverge from set methods – and preferred starting XIs – leading journalists to brand him as a “Taliban trainer”. Critics have suggested that his Napoli team failed to win the title last season because he had failed to rotate against weaker teams, leaving players exhausted by the end of the season.

 

Others will be more troubled by accusations of homophobia levelled against him by Roberto Mancini – who claimed Sarri called him a “faggot” during a Coppa Italia semi-final in 2016. Or indeed the response the Napoli manager gave to a female journalist, Titti Improta, who asked him about Napoli’s title prospects after a draw against Inter this March. “You’re a woman and you’re sweet,” Sarri said. “For this reason, I won’t tell you to go fuck yourself.”

Sarri was quick to apologise after the latter incident, yet we can say Chelsea’s newest hire is not a man who puts public image over instinct. Before Napoli’s win at Juventus in April, he was caught on camera showing his middle finger to opposition fans from the team bus.

Chelsea can see white smoke at last. The fireworks are still yet to come.

 

[compo 6,937]

• Sounds like an interesting character 

[MacK1950 2,357]

 Might have to start chewing gum unless he can access toilets at Ibrox.?

Quote

 

 

[Ser Barristan Selmy 222]

He won't be around very long so it seems pointless going into much detail about him. After all the managerial changes it's a bit odd Chelsea have ended up with an almost 60 year old who has never won a trophy. 

 

I think above all else, Chelsea finished 5th last season because they have the 5th best squad. Take Hazard out the side and you're looking at a pretty mediocre team. The side was poor defensively last season, lacked quality in the middle of the park and offers little in the final third aside from Hazard.

 

Chelsea need to be looking longer term and building something. They're a mess.

Edited July 19, 2018 by Ser Barristan Selmy

[buster. 5,097]

8 minutes ago, Ser Barristan Selmy said:

He won't be around very long so it seems pointless going into much detail about him. After all the managerial changes it's a bit odd Chelsea have ended up with an almost 60 year old who has never won a trophy. 

 

I think above all else, Chelsea finished 5th last season because they have the 5th best squad. Take Hazard out the side and you're looking at a pretty mediocre team. The side was poor defensively last season, lacked quality in the middle of the park and offers little in the final third aside from Hazard.

 

Chelsea need to be looking longer term and building something. They're a mess.

Don't dismiss the "almost 60 year olds" ya cheeky whippersnapper 

 

Vicente at 59.................

 

 

A few years earlier

 

 

 

Jupp Heynckes at 68

 

Edited July 19, 2018 by buster.

[craig 5,199]

27 minutes ago, Ser Barristan Selmy said:

He won't be around very long so it seems pointless going into much detail about him. After all the managerial changes it's a bit odd Chelsea have ended up with an almost 60 year old who has never won a trophy. 

 

I think above all else, Chelsea finished 5th last season because they have the 5th best squad. Take Hazard out the side and you're looking at a pretty mediocre team. The side was poor defensively last season, lacked quality in the middle of the park and offers little in the final third aside from Hazard.

 

Chelsea need to be looking longer term and building something. They're a mess.

They will be in an even bigger mess if Abramovich gets bored - and given their lack of success recently, plus his UK Visa issues, it is something which you think increases in likelihood.

[Ser Barristan Selmy 222]

My concern isn't his age, just his lack of success at such an age. An elite club like Chelsea should be challenging for the title and CL every season. To appoint an experienced manager with no trophies seems a bit odd. 

 

That said, I don't necessarily think it's a poor appointment. He plays the type of football I like which is a good start. 

[Ser Barristan Selmy 222]

2 minutes ago, craig said:

They will be in an even bigger mess if Abramovich gets bored - and given their lack of success recently, plus his UK Visa issues, it is something which you think increases in likelihood.

If he goes another billionaire will quickly snap them up. 

[craig 5,199]

Just now, Ser Barristan Selmy said:

If he goes another billionaire will quickly snap them up. 

Fair point.