CONTE: SERIAL WINNER FROM JUVENTUS KNOWS HOW TO LIFT TROPHIES
ANTONIO Conte tells his friends he does not sleep after defeat because it feels like he is dying. Winning? Well, winning charges through his body and feels like life.
Conte named his daughter Vittoria, and the literal translation from Italian is victory.
“How could I choose another name?” he smiled when he shared his happy news with colleagues.
These are the levels of obsession you reach when an athlete with a natural desire to win is soaked for many years in the Juventus way.
To her very core, the Old Lady of Italian football is all about the relentless pursuit of victory, even to the extreme point of domination.
“Win the Scudetto? There’s the Champions League,” Marcelo Lippi once said. “Win the Champions League? There’s the Inter-Continental Cup. Win the Inter-Continental Cup? There’s the Scudetto to win again. There’s little time for celebration.”
These words from Lippi are embossed on the wall beside the entrance to the glittering trophy room of the museum attached to the new Juventus Stadium.
Conte carries this spirit inside him from his 16 years in the blackand-white side of Turin.
As an influential midfielder and often captain during the golden Lippi era, he learned how to win and converted it successfully into a method of coaching.
Three years as manager at Juventus were defined by long unbeaten sequences, devastating winning bursts and ripped-up record books. Four months into his first season as Chelsea manager and he has already set a club record with 12 successive league victories.
His team will equal Arsenal’s record of 13 consecutive wins in a single Premier League season if Chelsea beat Stoke today.
These victories are fuelling him and yet his eyes are fixed on the prizes at the end of the season. True to the Juventus tradition, the first serious target is always the title.
As boss, he led Juve to their first hat-trick of Serie A titles since the 1930s, clinching the third with a record 102 points. They won all 19 home games and took a grip on the title with 12 wins in a row from October to January.
Even at the season’s end, Conte refused to ease up, winning the last seven games to smash the 100-point barrier and finish 17 clear of runners-up Roma.
Conte’s sights were set on the record points haul and he refused to tolerate the idea long since lodged in Italian football culture of coasting through the meaningless fixtures at the end of the season.
In his first season as Juve boss, his team became the first to survive unbeaten throughout a 38-game Serie A campaign and reached the Italian Cup final before losing to Napoli. They won 10 of their last 11 games and conceded just 20 goals.
Their form continued, winning nine of the first 10 games of his second season, despite him serving a touchline ban for match-fixing, something which he was later cleared of in court. Conte was unbeaten for his first 48 league games as manager and led all the way from the front to claim his second title, with his defence recording 19 clean sheets.
Parallels have taken shape at Chelsea since he knocked the team into his favourite shape, and his infectious winning mentality took hold. Goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois has been beaten just twice during the run of 12 wins, once by Gary Cahill, one of his own defenders.
Conte is fiercely driven. His passion connected him instantly to the fans who now sing his name when he would much rather hear them serenading his players.
Inside the club, he is popular, with a human touch to soften a ferocious work ethic.
He arrived early one morning before Christmas to leave bottles of wine and Prosecco on the desks of all staff in the first-team building, together with a hand-written note thanking them for their efforts and promising that they could achieve something great together.
The players will claim he understands the pressures of being an elite footballer and, while he is all about winning, he never fails to mention the pain of defeat.
Before the trip to Manchester City earlier this month he dodged comparisons to Pep Guardiola with a disarming reference to the major finals he lost as a player. As a coach, he has yet to achieve success on an international scale, and for this reason refuses to accept he is on a level with Guardiola or Jose Mourinho.
He reached the last eight of the Champions League during his second year at Juventus, having helped eliminate champions Chelsea in the group stage. A year later, Juve failed to reach the knockout rounds.
Conte dwells on defeat as if picking at a scar. Maybe it keeps him fresh and focused. Remember how you feel, the players often say when they’ve lost a big one. It is one of the mantras of sports psychology at an elite level.
Conte refuses to forget how it feels. It feels like death. Maybe it is part of the secret to his drive and his relentless obsession with victory. – Daily Mail