IT WILL be billed as the first brush between the Premier League’s elder statesman and the young pretender, the flashbulbs popping as the odd couple share a pre-match handshake at Old Trafford, yet the awkward formal introductions have already taken place in less auspicious surroundings.
In the bowels of Uefa’s headquarters this month, Alex Ferguson emerged from the gents as Andre Villas-Boas was trundling in. The initial meeting of minds took place right there.
The Portuguese was making his first appearance at the Elite Club Coaches’ forum in Nyon, the small-talk taking him from Pep Guardiola to Massimiliano Allegri, Arsene Wenger to Didier Deschamps. “Sir Alex was coming out of the loo and I was just there,” recalled Villas-Boas. “We said hello and spoke about something . . . Stoke, funnily enough. Stoke were one of the main discussion points of the elite clubs’ meeting.”
The desire to introduce offside at throw-ins will feel less relevant tomorrow, but it did at least help to break the ice. Ferguson, 69, has seen 13 other full-time Chelsea managers come and go over the quarter of a century he has been at Manchester United, though the incumbent is still an intriguing opponent.
Even a manager with Ferguson’s energy might feel his age when he casts his eye to the rival technical area to see Villas-Boas, at 33 and with his trademark blur of squats, lunges and tuck jumps, conducting his players from the touchline.
The 12-time Premier League and twice European Cup-winning manager considers it imperative that his successor has Champions League experience and hinted at a certain incredulousness yesterday, that one so young might find himself steering a club like Chelsea.
“It will be an incredible achievement,” he said when asked what it would mean should Villas-Boas win the title this term. “That somebody so young could go and do that would be incredible. You can’t dispute that.”
Ferguson may have started his own managerial career at 32 but he had taken over at East Stirling, a job that paid £40 per week and would occupy the novice for 117 days.
“It was only a part-time team, and the players were on about £5 a week,” said Ferguson. “The one common denominator is that you want to be successful. I set about it in determined fashion that I wasn’t going to fail. I’d been an engineer and I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to go back to engineering.
“I did all my coaching badges when I was young – 23 – so I’d prepared to be a manager. It’s important, if you want to be in the game, that you prepare to do that. Andre Villas-Boas took his Uefa badges at Largs in Scotland. When I went there it was full of fantastic coaches.”
Villas-Boas has not looked back since, his brief managerial career having yielded a glut of trophies. Ferguson claimed his first, the Scottish First Division title, with St Mirren, five months before the Portuguese was born.
The Scot’s appointment at Old Trafford in 1986 completely passed by Villas-Boas, hardly a surprise given he had only just turned nine. Indeed, the first Premier League side to prick his interest were Kenny Dalglish’s money-flushed Blackburn Rovers.
Did the younger man consider himself an “equal” of Ferguson at the meeting at Uefa? “No. As a manager his CV speaks for itself. You just have to praise someone who wins that much in the game. But when you see Ferguson, (Jose) Mourinho and Guardiola, it’s incredible the amount of times these people win, the amount of passion they have and how driven they are to be successful. It’s pretty good to be able to live with these examples at this moment.”
Might he be considered among their company in a decade? “Hopefully. Hopefully.”
Certainly the younger man is anything but daunted. It is 17 months since Villas-Boas lost a league game, when Benfica beat his Academica de Coimbra team 3-2, and he will take his Chelsea side to Old Trafford privately confident that he can outwit even the senior figure.
Thereafter, it will be down to his players. “This cannot be reduced just to two managers taking each other on,” said the Portuguese.
Given the intrigue around this first on-field meeting, that feels rather like wishful thinking.
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