Breaking from the past by hiring Emery, Sarri

Arsenal and Chelsea’s manager appointments seem to indicate that there’s a paradigm shift in the way the clubs are looking at success routes

KOLKATA: After living for 22 years with a man whose abhorrence for cigarettes led to Wojciech Szczesny being fined £20,000 (almost ₹18 lakh now), the Premiership has a manager whose nicotine habit seems like a throwback to when smoking was chic.

Of course, Maurizio Sarri can’t light up on the Chelsea bench — though newspaper reports last month said the club would provide him with a smoking area — but his arrival in a season that will be the first since 1996 without Arsene Wenger at Arsenal could be a pointer to changing times at two of the Premiership’s top-six clubs. Quite like the changing relationship between cigarettes and cinema. Wenger makes way for Unai Emery at Arsenal and Sarri replaces Antonio Conte; appointments that seem to suggest a clean break from the past.

From being a man ahead of his time when he arrived in England —focusing on diet, stressing on plyometrics, scouting abroad, making profits from transfers and showing insular England that foreign managers could be successful — Wenger, in the latter half of his reign, was looking like a man the Premiership had left behind.

So, enter Emery. “I think he [Emery] is a great coach,” Arsenal defender Hector Bellerin has said in ‘The Sun’. “He has great experience in Spain and he’s always played at the top level. It’s been very different for everyone [since Emery arrived]. Mr Wenger had been at the club for 22 years so obviously a lot of things have changed.”

The beginning of that change, though, predates Wenger’s exit. By appointing Raul Sanllehi as head of football relations, Arsenal showed they were preparing for a life without Wenger.

Sanllehi came from Barcelona, while Sven Mislintat was taken from Borussia Dortmund and made head of recruitments and summer appointments, Huss Fahmy moved from cycling’s Team Sky to be Arsenal’s contract negotiator and Darren Burgess became high performance director. These appointments, along with Wenger reaching a new low by finishing sixth, set the stage for Emery’s arrival.

And Emery has made his presence felt. “Training is way different, we are working on different things that we didn’t use to…,” said Bellerin. “He gave you a lot of freedom and now Unai Emery is a bit more tactical, more organised on the pitch.”

In central defender Sokratis Papastathopoulos, Emery has invested in a no-nonsense player. Ditto Lucas Torreira. These recruitments seem to suggest that Emery is keen on adding fight to Arsenal’s finesse. Emery may have won the French league but it is the coach who took Sevilla to three Europa League titles that Arsenal have invested in.

Given their trend of manager appointments, Emery would’ve seemed a better fit at Chelsea, in terms of age if nothing else but Chelsea shook off the conservatism associated with a top English club — the kind that saw Manchester United refuse to believe in Ryan Giggs — by hiring Sarri.

In early 2014, Sarri was coaching Empoli in Italy’s Serie B. Sarri is 59 and began full-time coaching only in 2001.

It was only at Napoli, his last club, that he got noticed with those 79 wins and 22 draws in 114 games! Pep Guardiola said he has a lot of time for Sarri’s high-pressing style and Gianluca Vialli compared a visit to Napoli’s training ground like going to the Silicon Valley. “There’s innovation, creativity,” he’s quoted as saying in a BBC report.

And as Chelsea try not to be a club buying its way to titles, Sarri seems to be the right man. After all, at Napoli he coped with Gonzalo Higuain’s departure by getting Dries Mertens to shift inside. Sarri has brought Jorginho with him for £57 million but his only other signing so far has been goalkeeper Robert Green.

Sarri replaced Conte once earlier in Italy but that lasted four months. He and Chelsea will hope it’ll be different this time.