Filed under: Football
The good news for Andre Villas-Boas is that he already knows the Chelsea players and the Chelsea players already know him. And that's the bad news as well because when they knew him he was merely one of Jose Mourinho's entourage; just a scout with a fat dossier under an arm rather than last season's conqueror of all domestic rivals and the winner of a European trophy as well.Now he is to be their leader. A helper still, but only up to a point as the one thing Chelsea have spectacularly failed to do since the Special One was jettisoned almost four years ago is live up to the Mourinho legacy.
Villas-Boas would do well not to greet his squad as friends reunited but instead sit them down and show them a video of Porto's season. As if to say 'that is what a winning team looks like - now we will do things my way'.
But that was the sort of trick Mourinho might have pulled and it is unlikely the 33-year-old, who has been at pains to stress he is no Jose clone, will go down that route. Indeed, he has already been praising the sacked Carlo Ancelotti for efforts that failed to please Roman Abramovich.
"You can't avoid the things Carlo has left for this club, important things," he declared. "We want to continue building from where he left.
"Most of the people who are here are people I know, which is a big advantage. The players I know, the relationship I had with them. The relationship also of pride for what they have done and for what I've achieved with my technical staff and players, this is all coming together for the motivation we need for next season to win again."
Mourinho was always keen to play down the time when he was Sir Bobby Robson's little helper at Sporting Lisbon, then Porto and finally Barcelona, where he is still disparagingly referred to as The Translator, but Villas-Boas is again happy to wander down the opposite avenue.
"Bobby was a very important person in my career," he said, recalling his first steps in the world of professional football. "He was the person who advised me at a very young age to go on coaching courses and unlocked the doors of Porto for me to have access to his training sessions.
"We had a very good relationship and he was someone I respected a lot and was respected in world football. What he did he did not only with me and Jose but with all different kinds of people, promoting them and inspiring them to take their own role and their own way.
"He is somebody who means a lot to the English game and I think he would be happy of course, to see me here at Chelsea now."
And those could prove to be rather wise words given the way Sir Bobby is revered in his homeland, especially since his death. Indeed, this very weekend marks the 25th anniversary of England's controversial World Cup defeat by Diego Maradona and the his Hand of God, with BBC 5 Live about to air the drama Don't Cry For Me Maradona, with Tim Healy playing the knight and his own wife Denise Welch Robson's widow Elsie.
Andre Villas-Boas is clearly a man who is not ashamed of his roots, or for that matter his route to the top. And that will be just as well because he will be facing the past as well as the future when he opens the Stamford Bridge home dressing room for the first time. Yet no doubt he is busy preparing right now for that very moment.
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