HAS ZIDANE FINALLY PROVED HE’S THE REAL DEAL?
ON THE brink of his second Champions League final in his first 17 months as Real Madrid coach, Zinedine Zidane sat before the world’s media this week still glowing from the club’s league triumph a week earlier.
He said: ‘It’s a wonderful feeling and it hasn’t gone away yet.’ On the night the title was won he admitted: ‘I feel like getting up on the table and dancing.’
The job that so furrowed the brows of Jose Mourinho and Rafa Benitez has come easily to him, to the point where commentators have asked whether he is the new Pep Guardiola — playing legend turned serial trophy-winning coach — or simply the luckiest man in football?
Unlike Guardiola, no one expected Zidane to become a coach. In Les Yeux
Dans les Bleus, the documentary of France’s 1998 World Cup- winning campaign, it was Didier Deschamps seen giving last-minute orders to his team-mates in the dressing room.
Zidane features, sat at the back of the team bus reading and sucking on a lollipop, playing basketball in the dressing room minutes before kick-off, or yawning his way through the down time between matches.
French journalist Fred Traini, who has followed Zidane for 20 years, said: ‘In that team Deschamps and Laurent Blanc were the leaders, Zidane was the charisma.’
SOHAS he just been lucky to average a trophy almost every 100 days since taking charge of Real in January 2016? Traini says: ‘There is so much more to it than luck. It’s the story of his career. Think about the two goals he scored in the 1998 final. He rarely scored with his head so you think, “What good luck to score two near-post headers”.
‘But then you find out that the manager Aime Jacquet has said to him before the game, “They don’t defend corners very well so you go for a wander to the front post”. Behind the good fortune there is a perfectly executed plan.’
It has been that way since Zidane became Real coach and Traini calls it
La Baraka — to be in favour with God. As for the question of whether Zidane is the new Guardiola, L’Equipe’s Madrid correspondent Freddie Hermel said: ‘No, he’s the complete opposite. Guardiola is dogmatic whereas Zidane is pragmatic. He would never change the team to suit his tactical preferences.’
He has benefited, as Guardiola did, from having worn the shirt. ‘If you have been a player here then it makes it easier to be a manager here,’ says Real captain Sergio Ramos. ‘Zizou has a naturalness to him. He had it as a player and he has it as a coach, too.’
Former Real midfielder Fernando Redondo says: ‘I see a lot of Vicente del Bosque in him, that ability to manage the pressures of the job.’
It is the knack of convincing rather than ordering players to do things and Zidane has taken the art of persuasion to new levels, making Cristiano Ronaldo take important rest during the season.
Making the team fitter than ever is another battle Zidane has won. He brought in Italian fitness coach Antonio Pintus from Lyon last summer and Pintus won the players over immediately.
The day before flying to Norway for the European Super Cup in August, Zidane called in the internationals who were not playing for a special training session. His focus could have been on the trophy, instead he was thinking further ahead and such gestures are not forgotten.
Pintus, who worked with Zidane at Juventus, was not his only astute recruit. When he took the reigns he insisted that his assistant with the Real B-team, David Bettoni, remained by his side.
Bettoni has known Zidane since they were teenagers in the youth team at Cannes, where they shared a flat. Bettoni was a second division defender but Zidane appointed him even though he lacked the FIFA badges to be in the technical area for their first game.
The pair have thrived and Zidane has earned the respect of other coaches, too. Tony Adams joked: ‘Zidane, let’s swap teams,’ after his Granada side were beaten by Madrid, but Eibar coach Jose Luis Mendilibar says the quality of the players at Zidane’s disposal has meant he has had to show different qualities. ‘Coaching is not just about knowing how to put on a good session or knowing your rivals,’ said Mendilibar. ‘You need to know how to manage the group.’
There will be tests around the corner. Last summer Zidane wanted Paul Pogba but he knew that Madrid president Florentino Perez was unwilling to enter into a bidding war. This summer David de Gea could be the issue because Zidane is a big fan of Keylor Navas, who De Gea would expect to replace.
If it all goes wrong in the long term, Zidane’s stock is high enough at home that he is most people’s choice to be the next France coach. ‘It’s not a job he would turn down,’ says Traini.
FORthe moment he shows no sign of burning out in the way that Guardiola eventually did at Barcelona. Asked before the last league game of the season: ‘Do you feel what you have achieved has not been properly recognised?’, he replied: ‘ No. They are happy with me . . . I think.’
It is fair to say they are ecstatic and if he becomes the first manager to win backto-back Champions Leagues then even more so.
Some in football will lament the feat being achieved by someone who can give the appearance of making it up as he goes along. But surely it is time to admit that you can get lucky and reach one European Cup final, but not two.
‘It’s true he is shy, the hardest thing for him to deal with is the popularity,’ Del Bosque once said of Zidane.
The popularity will know no bounds on Sunday in Madrid if Zidane is being driven around the city on an open-top bus with the club’s 12th European Cup.