Popularity contest may prove futile for Scolari

Making Chelsea lovable will not sedate the appetite for silverware at Stamford Bridge, writes Andrew Fifield

LUIZ FELIPE Scolari likes a challenge. This is a man who once vowed to root out any homosexual in his Brazil squad and then tried to defuse that controversy by lobbying the national football federation to appoint two astrologers to his backroom staff.

Neither pursuit was entirely successful, yet both appear almost routine compared to the new task he has set himself: making Chelsea popular.

It's always easier to love a loser, of course, but given Scolari's expression as he stalked from the dugout yesterday - similar to a man who has just discovered his daughter is bringing Joey Barton to dinner - the defeat to Liverpool was not part of the masterplan to win a few hearts and minds.

After all, wanting to gain affection, not just grudging admiration, does not mean the baying bloodhounds in Chelsea's boardroom have lost their ravenous appetite for silverware.

The problem is not unique to Scolari. "Today, when the salary and also the image of the player has risen to unparalleled heights, it's not sufficient to become champions," wrote one leading manager. "Of equal importance, in my book, is to behave like champions."

This, to all intents and purposes, could be Scolari's mantra for today's Chelsea. In fact, it's provenance is rather startling.

For one thing, it was penned in 1970, which puts the kybosh on the theory that the raging disparity between player behaviour and wages is solely a feature of the greed-is-good Premier League. Instead, it suggests that footballers have always been unbearable.

More shocking still is the identity of its author - Don Revie, the old Leeds manager who, as popular folklore has it, would keep Johnny Giles and Norman Hunter locked in a cage, dangling pieces of raw meat in front of their blood-red eyes, until letting them loose moments before kick-off to chew the kneecaps off some poor unsuspecting centre-forward, while Elland Road howled in grim northern approval.

It is almost 20 years since Revie succumbed to the debilitating effects of motor neurone disease, and yet his status as the purists' ultimate bogeyman remains relatively unchallenged.

Tales of his cynical, joyless methods are legion - from the tottering stacks of files which filled every corner of his training ground bunker, to the quiet words he regularly exchanged with match officials as they disappeared into the tunnel for a half-time brew.

Revie does not deserve to be palmed off as some pantomime villain. The more luminous aspects of Leeds' football in their 1970s heyday have still never been adequately recognised, while Revie and his backroom staff were attempting to instil life skills - from how to deal with supporter adulation, to the importance of good manners at the dinner table - into their young professionals while Arsene Wenger, that supposed trend-setter, was still a spotty teenager.

None of this is remembered. Instead, Revie's most enduring legacy is the "Dirty Leeds" moniker which has clung like a limpet to his old club for over 30 years and which should serve as a reminder to Scolari of how fiendishly difficult it is to garner both pots and plaudits.

Yet the Brazilian can still be quietly confident.

For one thing, he does not have Brian Clough to worry about. It was to Revie's eternal misfortune that he was forced to go head-to-head with the biggest noggin of them all in a patently unfair popularity contest.

While Clough charmed and chirruped in front of the cameras, Revie stammered and yammered; where Clough espoused free footballing spirits, not to mention plenty of the bottled variety, Revie did most of his poring over dossiers and scouting reports; and while Clough gained PR brownie points for refusing to cow to authority, Revie knew how to grease the political pole, a trick that landed him the England job at his rival's expense, albeit with disastrous results.

Scolari has none of these problems. Not only did he spurn the chance to drink from England's poisoned chalice, but he has no rival like Clough taking pot-shots at his every move. Only a juicy Champions League draw will bring him into conflict with Jose Mourinho - Clough's natural heir - while of the Premier League's elder statesmen, Wenger shies away from controversy and Alex Ferguson is cute enough to realise there is little point in riling a man of Scolari's stature.

The absence of a managerial feud should at least allow Chelsea's football to speak for itself, although yesterday's ineffective display, against another side whose commitment to puritanical pragmatism makes them hard to love, was without doubt their most inarticulate of the season.

Watching it, some of the waverers will have gone away unconvinced that Chelsea can ever be cherished. And maybe that's for the best: Scolari already possesses perhaps the league's strongest squad and, give or a take a Mancunian Sheikh or two, its deepest pockets. Once he is the neutrals' favourite as well, the game really will be up.