Profile Monaco coach Didier DeschampsMatt Scott offers an insight into Monaco manager Didier Deschamps as his team prepare to face Chelsea in the semi-finals of the Champions League tonight

Didier Deschamps is the living embodiment of the club he manages. Only 5ft 7in, he has always punched well above his weight, just like his side, whose crowds average about 10,000. Against Chelsea tonight, he takes Monaco into their third Champions League semi-final in 11 years, the others achieved by Arsene Wenger and Jean Tigana, two men whose managerial careers blossomed in the Mediterranean principality.

Unlike Wenger, who was mocked as "Clouseau" by Arsenal's senior players when he arrived there, Deschamps's achievements as a player commanded instant respect from his squad.

More even than Tigana, he has 103 caps, a World Cup, a European Championship and two Champions League winners' medals as well as a total of five titles from Italy and France, the Coppa Italia and the FA Cup. There is perhaps no one in the game who can point to a more decorated playing career.

But Deschamps had not intended management to come so soon when, in 2001, he hung up his boots aged 32.

"Didier was in contact with Monaco about joining them as a player, then they raised the subject of becoming the manager and he thought he would give it a try," said his agent Jeannot Werth. "He never had a burning ambition to manage a club right now. It's something he did spontaneously when the opportunity came."

His honours have given him immense pulling power. Even a seasoned campaigner such as Fernando Morientes, the Spanish international who was a three-time European Cup winner at Real Madrid, had no hesitation in joining Deschamps's Monaco.

Morientes, whose flagging career was revitalised by the move to the Stade Louis II and whose two headed goals helped knock Real Madrid out in the previous round, describes the Frenchman as "phenomenal".

Yet his peripatetic playing career, which took in Nantes, Marseille, Bordeaux, Juventus, Chelsea and Valencia, did not lend itself to immediate success as a coach. Having left Marseille for Turin in 1994, he required a period of readjustment in his homeland.

"Didier had lost touch with French football during his years in Italy, England and Spain so he needed a few months to get used to it again," said Monaco's director of football Henri Biancheri. "But I am not surprised by his achievements. He had a difficult first few months but then in his second season he finished second in the league and won the League Cup, so already you could say last year was very, very positive."

A 15th-place finish in his first season as coach saw him criticised and accused by pundits of failing to handle his players. Though matters on the pitch improved dramatically in his second campaign, it was against a backdrop of intense external pressure.

A debt estimated at £35-£50 million led to Monaco's expulsion from France's top league, a decision overturned on appeal. In troubled times, only the force of Deschamps's personality kept his coveted players from flying the nest.

"At the end of last season all the players wanted to stay under him," recalled Biancheri. "He had everyone's ear in the squad. He is an intelligent man and he tried to get the players around him. With all the noise that was going on around the club about the relegation and financial problems, he said don't worry, and the players believed him."

Eric Cantona's famous "water-carrier" sneer notwithstanding, those who know him say Deschamps is above all else a "leader". Not afraid to raise his voice, he takes the man-management skills of France's World Cup-winning coach Aime Jacquet as his inspiration. In a youthful side in which the back four have an average age of 23, he finds a receptive audience.

He is very attentive to his pastoral duties and can draw on the devastating impact of the death of his elder brother Philippe in an air crash, when he was 18. He says of the episode: "It left a hole in my life nothing will ever fill." He has seldom spoken of it at length, even to his closest friends.

Such conversations he reserves for his wife Claude, whom he met aged 17 at a party while at the Nantes academy and who offers him support and critical insight.

After initially bringing in his own coaching team, he turned to club stalwarts. Jean Petit, previously assistant manager under Wenger but reduced to a scouting role, was reinstated as assistant and Antonio Pintus, whom he had got to know at Chelsea, became fitness coach. Pintus, an Italian whose spell at Chelsea was ended by Claudio Ranieri, is very much an adherent of Deschamps's underlying philosophy: hard graft produces results.

"Didier has built a team in his own image," said his former international colleague Emmanuel Petit. "The team is very hard up but it has talent and works with humility. Everyone puts himself to the service of the squad but there is always a place for individuals to express themselves. He knows how to make players progress, both individually and collectively. That's the mark of a very good coach."

When it comes to tactics, Deschamps has studied under one of the greats. "I've got to know all kinds of coaches," he says. "But on the technical front, I'm inspired by (Marcello) Lippi."

And soon the apprentice may supplant his master. Though Deschamps denies encouraging any overtures, Juventus are casting covetous eyes. A win against Chelsea could be his stepping stone.