adminLONDON. – Someone compared Antonio Conte last week to a trullo, the Spartan dry-stone hut with a conical roof built for agricultural labourers which is unique to the Chelsea manager’s native Puglia, on the heel of the Italian peninsula.
The construction’s functionality and extreme flexibility sums up the man who exudes less razzle-dazzle than Pep Guardiola, Mauricio Pochettino and Jose Mourinho, and features far less than them in the English Premier League soccer conversation, yet is on the brink of outclassing all three.
The other members of that elite young managerial quartet have fascinated more than the Italian because of their complexity, their poetry and perhaps also their photogenicity. Conte, with his gradually improving English and puritanical work ethic, is not so beguiling, though the clinical 3-0 win at Everton on Sunday demonstrates that he will have the last word this season. On paper, it was Chelsea’s last major Premier League challenge.
Conte has demonstrated his flexibility, of course, with his willingness to switch Chelsea to a 3-4-3 system on the basis of the personnel available to him – just as he abandoned 4-2-4 for 3-5-2 at Juventus. Systems are “the clothes that best fit the players,” Conte once said. But there are also Spartan qualities about the way the players are put to work.
“That’s the prime difference – the training. Relentless. It sometimes seems endless,” says one source close to Conte’s league leaders. That was evident at Goodison, in the team’s capacity to break out of their own ranks with incredible intensity, despite a tough examination in the game’s first hour.
There was also a hint of how uncompromising Conte can be in his post-match press conference, when he said of match-winner and star operator Pedro that “for him it is a good season but not a fantastic season.” This was no teenager he was talking about.
“Quasi-military,” is how World Soccer describes the Conte training regime in a profile of the manager this month. The 47-year-old is a devotee of the “yo-yo tests” – intervals repeated over a prolonged period of time – and apparently does not consider fitness to be an ancillary discipline, best left to his staff to run.
He supervises it himself. His creed, identical to that of England rugby union coach Eddie Jones, is that you train at a higher level of intensity than that expected in the next game so your energy levels are comfortably sufficient. “You are training at game intensity or above,” says the source.
Jose Mourinho was known at Chelsea for training ground intensity, too, though at times during the catastrophic autumn of 2015 his players felt they were being flogged to death. Conte’s obsession with these sessions seems to entail knowing when enough is enough.
Players have responded, much as Juve’s did when he arrived in 2011 and took them to three successive titles. “He needed only one speech, with many simple words, to conquer both me and Juventus,” Andrea Pirlo later observed. “He had fire running through his veins and he moved like a viper. He told us” – The Independent.
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