At last, here we are again, at the end and denouement of the Premier League season. At 25, the league is at an intersection of sports and crass commercialism, an intriguing product of high performance, competitive sports in fabulous stadia distributed in multimedia form, generating compelling stories and, crucially, tapping into profound senses of tribalism.
The Premier League provides great “sportainment”. The past ten months have confirmed that, but amid all the hype and hysteria there was a simple and steadfast beacon: Chelsea and their manager Antonio Conte. On Friday, the Italian coach may celebrate the English title if his Chelsea can overcome West Bromwich Albion.
Cue pandemonium in West London and the open bus top celebrations, team selfies, the lachrymose hooray for club icon John Terry and champagne toasts to a meritocratic triumph and deserved coronation of England’s most distinguished XI. Title-victory parties are a set of rituals and yet with Chelsea and Conte, it feels strangely peculiar.
The name’s Conte, not Guardiola or Mourinho
The Italian coach was never supposed to be in this position. In pre-season, the air crackled across the English mainland as the arrival of sophisticated European coaches at their new clubs prompted renewed excitement in the league and its many subplots. Pep Guardiola at Manchester City and José Mourinho at Manchester United were to drive their outfits to the top of the British game, impose a northern duopoly and, ultimately, duel as two eminent overlords for supremacy in a helter-skelter exchange of footballing refinement.
But with two match days left, it is Conte who is looking at the stars – and not Mourinho or Guardiola. Chelsea’s previous season was a protracted melodrama when the love between Mourinho and Chelsea, the club and the institution, revealed its true depths in the hour of separation. Players deserted their coach and Chelsea’s existential crisis spiralled out of control with months of crass disillusion. It was neither Roman Abramovich’s, nor Mourinho’s finest hour.
This season Chelsea couldn’t and shouldn’t have competed, but Conte may steer the Blues to victory. He won’t be feted as Claudio Ranieri, whose feat with Leicester City last season accorded him the acclaimed status of coaching deity and eternal pedagogue – but 2017 became an annus horribilis for the Italian and his players abandoned him.
Chelsea’s turnaround
At Chelsea, Conte engineered a reversal. His huge workload and manic attention to detail galvanised an ensemble of hugely overpaid ballerinas, who had foregone any professional decency and decorum under Mourinho. With a-mansion-a-week-salary, football had seemed but an irrelevance to Eden Hazard and others at Stamford Bridge. They sauntered about as the malaise festered.
Conte can be confrontational. His voice carries at practice sessions, with players not always pleased by the stop-start nature of proceedings. The Italian believes that everyone must give a 100% at the club. He is a perfectionist, but in return, offers the knowledge that he absorbed as a player under Giovanni Trappatoni, Carlo Ancelotti and Marcelo Lippi and fine-tuned as a coach, first with smaller Italian clubs, and then with Juventus.
At Euro 2016, he guided a limited Italian team to the quarter-finals. On Friday, he may follow in the footsteps of Ancelotti and Roberto Mancini as the fourth Italian coach to win the English league. The school of Italian coaches remains strong with Serie A offering a wonderful and wealthy labyrinth of football tactics and opportunities for elaborate chess matches. There is also Coverciano, the Italian Football Federation’s acclaimed technical centre.
But great coaches can also adapt. They may be single-minded and adhere to a particular philosophy, but aren’t bound by any ideological straightjackets. Coaches are no longer the often semi-clerical figures of the 60s and the 70s stuck in a lonely universe of ideation and pertinacity. They evolve when required.
Conte dispatched Chelsea’s back four, pushing the players well out of their comfort zone. His much lauded 3-4-3 is a system that pushed senior players Terry and Branislav Ivanovic out of the starting line-up. David Luiz, the “Mineirazo Manic”, became the wondrous cynosure of Chelsea’s defence and N’Golo Kante marshalled the midfield, leaving Hazard and Pedro to roam around and express their creativity.
At times Chelsea have been rampant. They were found out just twice, by Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United. Those defeats will consume Conte – imagine the Italian in a bunker under a Brompton cemetery in a dimly lit chamber amid stacks of notes and a few chalkboards, fretting and moping about intolerable defeats and his player’s tactical ineptitude, brooding over a new system to win the next match. For now though, his team are within a touch of glory.