I don’t want this to sound bad but you have to be different, a bit special; half-mad. I talk to a lot of people, ex-team-mates especially – Roberto Di Matteo, Dan Petrescu, Gianfranco Zola – and there’s always someone with us who says: ‘Don’t do it! Don’t coach! What do you need it for? Go to the beach, play golf.’ As a manager, you’re so exposed: every decision, every gesture, every face, every little detail. Everything is so …”
Gus Poyet blows out his cheeks and not for the last time: “Tremendo!,” he says. “It’s not easy, it’s really not. Either you have total control of your emotions, or at least know how to manage them, or you can’t do it. It’s endless. The changing emotions in a game, the next day, the day after, and on and on. Look at the heart attacks happening.”
Poyet has looked and listened. “Martin Ling, who had an anxiety attack, a breakdown, gave us this incredible talk. He said: ‘I was like you are’: there was no warning, nothing but one day, it just happened. He stopped the car, called an ambulance, couldn’t breathe. He was out of football for a long time, suffering. He said to us: ‘It’s so easy to describe … and so hard to stop.’
“A player trains all week to reach the high point for the game and then,” Poyet continues, raising his hand and letting it fall. “Whereas we go up, up, up … and we don’t come down. There’s no drop off, no recovery. After the game: go to the moon. That’s fundamental. I’d love to think that for one day, football’s finished, doesn’t exist. But I can’t.” The sensible thing would be to get out? “Totally, totally but I can’t help it. I like it.”
You can tell. There is a reason they nicknamed Poyet “Radio”: always on, always talking, especially when it comes to football. From Leicester to Guardiola to Simeone and Wise; from River Plate – “the Uruguayan one” – to Grenoble, Zaragoza, Brighton and Chelsea. Spurs, too: “Dele Alli is going to a big player for a very long time”, he says and “Mauricio Pochettino has done something unique: the great thing about Tottenham is that they’ll have seven or eight players at the perfect age in a few years – still young, but experienced. If he can keep that group, wow, it’ll be spectacular.”
As Poyet talks the enthusiasm overflows; so does his speech, quicker and quicker, hands moving as fast, time flying; pulling faces, making gestures, laughing, telling stories, taking a thousand tangents, explaining. Wishing he could explain more, too, imagining himself on the pitch, pre-game, microphone in hand: “Ladies and gentlemen of the crowd: today’s tactical decision …” He recalls apologising to his Brighton players: “I cocked it up completely.” He laughs but you can tell it hurt, too.
Sure, Poyet admits, there is a lot of crap in football – infamously, there was even that one in the Crystal Palace dressing room – but there is a lot that is good too and the game has a hold on him. There is a sadness when he admits many players do not even like football: “‘Barcelona-Bayern was on last night and you didn’t watch it?’ How can you play a pass if you didn’t even watch that? In Uruguay, every game we play is the last: tomorrow, there’s no more football. It’s over. Today’s the last game ever so you give everything.” Maybe that’s it; although English words occasionally punctuate his speech, the Uruguayan accent is strong and so is the personality. There is something about the way he throws himself into it, a love of the struggle. And, as it turns out, there’s always a tomorrow.
Poyet’s career began in France where the chance to join Nice was taken from him so he stayed to play for Grenoble: “horribly,” he says. But there was also the Copa América; the cup wins, and the Cup Winners’ Cup wins too, with Real Zaragoza and with Chelsea. He was captain the day Chelsea became the first club to field a team of foreigners and remembers the media, the tunnel, someone warning “we’d better win” and hurriedly handing the armband back to the next game. He has been sacked as many times as he has been employed as a coach but keeps coming back. Why? Because.
So here he is, in Seville: Gus Poyet, manager of Real Betis, preparing for the visit of the European Champions on Saturday. In his office the whiteboard is dotted with tiny magnets: one for each team. This week’s magnet: Real Madrid.
Poyet has taken a long route here. Having begun his coaching career alongside Wise with Swindon and then Leeds before becoming Juande Ramos’s assistant at Spurs, he arrived in Spain via jobs at Brighton, Sunderland and AEK Athens. In Greece, he lasted four months. At Brighton, he won the League One title and got into the Championship play-offs. At Sunderland, he somehow completed a survival he calls “miraculous” and “incredible”, dragging them out of “intensive care”. It made no difference; all three clubs sacked him.
“There’s something inside Sunderland, something at its very core,” he says. “It’s hard to explain but there’s a way of life, something deep down, that makes it difficult to fulfil its potential. Niall Quinn criticised me for saying so but later talked about ‘gremlins’; then Paulo Di Canio talked about that moment when you get your head above the parapet and … bang! There’s something there, something I couldn’t find. If I knew what it was I’d say but I don’t. But it’s there and needs to be changed at the root.
“I played at Sunderland with Chelsea. We lost 4-1 and I left thinking: ‘That was spectacular.’ The passion was explosive. They had Quinn and Kevin Phillips and it was a good moment. Peter Reid was there: an absolute phenomenon but a year later, the same fans were shouting at him from behind the bench. You can’t say that with Quinn and Phillips he’s a good coach and without them he’s not but he went.”
Others go, too; the best player’s destiny is to depart. “A player has a good season, and [someone takes him]. It makes no difference if they give you £20m for him – £20m doesn’t replace him and doesn’t solve anything. The year I arrived they told me Mignolet, Henderson and Rose had been the best; [soon,]Mignolet wasn’t there, Henderson wasn’t there and Rose had returned to Spurs. By January the players giving me exactly what I needed were Keane, Alonso and Borini. All on loan, and they all went.
“So then I go. Dick Advocaat comes in and the blame lies with the last coach and his signings. So you sign new players for the new manager. And then that manager goes and the blame lies with him and his players. So the new manager signs new players. And in comes Sam Allardyce. And then he goes and now David Moyes is there and he has what’s been left him by previous coaches and you can’t go on like that. You just can’t. It’s impossible. Because when you start from zero every year – every year – you stay at zero.
“You have to hire a coach and say: ‘Whatever happens, this is my coach for five years. No. Matter. What. And we’ll put a team together under his orders.’ And with time, if you chose well, you have a chance. But it’s five months Allardyce, five months Martin O’Neill, five months Poyet. If it’s Moyes it’s Moyes whatever happens. And you have to say: ‘We’re going to ensure Moyes has the right tools.’ You need 10 months to get started, to build but when they don’t give you 10 months …”
No one will, he knows. That’s football. At Betis, Poyet has Rubén Castro, the scorer of 51 league goals over the last two seasons and four this; he talks highly of Joaquín, “a player I liked before, and even more now”, someone who doesn’t just play football but “really understands it”; and of the Chelsea loanee Charly Mousonda, he says: “He has everything to be a special player.”
Mousonda, like his Betis team, is a work in progress. “He just lacks that ability to make the right decisions: that’s what really defines a player. If Charly can make the right decisions at the end of the move …” Poyet puffs his cheeks out again. “He does everything at 150 mph and it can be difficult to slow down and go, tac.”
Poyet’s fondness for Real’s Luka Modric is clear. He is the footballer with the most quality he has worked with but injury means there will be no reunion, leaving only Gareth Bale. “It’ll be nice to see him,” Poyet says. “He was a left-back then: Juande Ramos wanted to play him further forward but, inside, Gareth still saw himself as a full-back: he wanted space to run into and starting further forward he wouldn’t get it. It was hard to change his mind. But then came the season when he went to another level. Now that’s where he is – he feels important, this is his moment, he’s developed a style that includes the responsibility to attack and he doesn’t have to defend as much. Going to Madrid has taken him to another level.”
As Poyet is talking about Bale, his assistant sticks his head around the door. In a cockney accent, he asks: “What time do you want us in tomorrow?” He’s from Andalucía, then? “Shepherd’s Bush,” Poyet laughs. Another reminder of the impact England has had on a man who when he talks about home means London. The assistant’s name is Anthony Philip David Terry Frank Donald Stanley Gerry Gordon Stephen James Oatway. “Yeah, and they call him Charlie!” Poyet bursts out laughing.
Charlie Oatway, who finished his playing career at Havant and Waterlooville, is named after the QPR team who won promotion in 1973. If Poyet was to do the same, his son would be called Andoni Alberto Fernando Xavi Jesús Santi Mohammed Gustavo Francisco Miguel Juan Poyet. Luckily for Diego Poyet, his father’s memories of his Zaragoza’s Cup-Winner’s Cup winning team and of Nayim lobbing David Seaman from 40 yards, were not written across a birth certificate.
Recently released by West Ham, an England Under-17 international who switched to Uruguay at under-20 level, Diego, like his father, is a midfielder: just the kind Real Madrid could do with, in fact.
They will be without the injured Casemiro and Poyet admits that makes them “another team”. “People said Zinedine Zidane was good four months ago and now he’s bad. No, four months ago he found the solution: Casemiro. Now, he doesn’t have that solution. He hasn’t got another player like him, either.”
So much the better. Yet it is not as if Real do not concern him. There is work to do still in Seville . The answer for Charlie is a little after nine: preparation continues right up until that moment just before kick-off, when Betis’s manager will deliver one last message. Enjoy it, perhaps? “Forget that. I wrote ‘enjoy it’ on the board at the Camp Nou and we swallowed six … so, ‘enjoy it?’ No! Never again,” he says, laughing. Somehow you know he will. Gus Poyet just cannot help it.
(Guardian service)
