Potter entering the unknown

Football management can be a vicious business. It has not escaped my notice that Chelsea have been doing a number on thomas tuchel since they sacked him this week: subtly spinning against him and undermining him to justify the decision to make him a scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong there. this is not an environment Graham Potter will be familiar with.

I was Southampton manager when I signed Potter as a 21-year-old from Stoke for £250,000 in the mid-1990s on the recommendation of the late terry Cooper, my assistant, who’d worked with him at birmingham City. He was quiet but a really good lad around the dressing room and a bit of a utility player for us.

Potter has done a fantastic job at another south coast club, brighton, but it’s a different world he enters now. Everyone in that Chelsea dressing room will be looking at him, assessing him, judging whether they are going to learn from him and whether he has what it takes to get them back to winning trophies. they will need to be convinced he is the right man for the job, while a manager with a big track record would be more readily accepted.

It’s after picking half a dozen teams that Potter will face the real problems — from the guys who are not in the starting XI. He has got to keep them quiet — and that’s why the first month is so important. He must be himself. He must remember the reasons why he has earned the chance to do this job. but winning every game in that first month would certainly also help.