Down and out in Bordeaux

[Spart]

It had been a move that was entirely in keeping with his plan. At the age of just 28, he had upped sticks and moved his young family from the suburbs of Enschede near the Netherlands-Germany border for another step up the ladder with Girondins de Bordeaux. His wife and two children had yet to settle into their new surroundings after four months in the southwest of France. Discomfort on the home front was hardly helping our hero find his feet in his new position as manager.

With 12 league games played, Bordeaux were adrift in 19th place with just a single win to their name. No matter how impressive his previous work had been in the Netherlands, where he turned FC Twente into stylish, runaway title-winners and Europa League dark horses in the space of just 18 months, turning around a squad that had lost all motivation and direction, and a club that looked set to be swallowed up by its own incompetence off the pitch, that counted for little with an increasingly angry local crowd who viewed his tactics and mannerisms with contempt. He was already being derided in the press. A few high profile bust ups with established players had seen an exodus in pre-season as the player roster was ripping apart and rebuilt in a single window. He needed ball-players, dribblers, clever footballers who could thread a pass through the gaps and lines of an opponent rather than bruising target men and galloping midfielders. Bordeaux looked like a team caught in the middle of a transition that should have been attempted over the course of a couple of seasons, not a couple of months.

Perhaps it was his lack of experience that had caused him to rush his renovations? An international footballer whose career was ended by injury at just 24 years of age, he had refused to let his chances in the game slip away and instead threw himself into coaching. Working through a growing list of contacts and well-wishers, he amassed experience working or watching at clubs in the Bundesliga, La Liga, Premier League and finally the Eredivisie as he worked through his coaching badges. Ironically, he arrived in France unable to speak a word of French but fully fluent in Dutch, German, Spanish and, of course, English. The idea was to go and expand his horizons and build up his CV as a manager on the continent, to make a go of it abroad while his reputation as a player still meant something, rather than sinking down into the depths of the Football League. It wasn't that he believed that kind of football to be beneath him. Not at all. He just what sort of approach he wanted to develop himself, and the fast and furious nature of his homeland's lower divisions wouldn't be suited to his ideas. At least not yet. He needed to prove himself and sharpen his thinking in a more agreeable setting first.

That's why he chose to remain in the Netherlands, lingering on to find the right job until Twente came calling. His introduction to life as a proper, fully-fledged first-team manager at the age of 26 was fairly brutal. Within the first four months he had ended up in a team meeting with his captain and senior players, all of whom were questioning whether he had gone into this all too early. It was an awkward conversation, as he attempted to stand his ground, talk round the doubters and enforce his authority over a clutch of footballers older, wiser and more experienced than him - a broken wonderkid who had previously only assisted other head coaches or taken care of the youth teams and reserves. However, he somehow managed it. The results improved. A year later, they were champions and every single one of the seniors that entered his office to try and coax a resignation out of him left the club for massive pay days elsewhere, having excelled and improved under his guidance. He had hoped to convince at least a couple of them to come with him to his next club but the wages on offer in the Premier League, La Liga and Serie A were too much for Bordeaux. Instead, he was arrogant enough to assume he could work the same trick over a new set of players, or find more bargains in the transfer market to augment the bones of the team he would inherit in France.

So far, no good. The board had already called him in once to explain himself. Later, Bordeaux were knocked out of the French cup in the first round. It was almost more concerning that a request to return to the boardroom for another postmortem never arrived. Perhaps they were already working to try and find a candidate to salvage a season that had quickly begun to look like a rudderless relegation battle under a novice manager who had no idea what they were doing: a beginner out of his depth and running out of time. The club's dressing room was far more volatile and unforgiving than the one he had managed to master in Enschede. Many of the players he would need to rely on to help him dig the team out of this mess may have already given up on him and his reign. Given the state of their finishing, some may have already begun to work against him on the pitch in the hope that his superiors would see sense and parachute in a replacement to save their finishing bonuses.

He couldn't think like that. Confidence was also an issue. As he had begun to tell the waiting reporters after every single match, his strikers were snatching at chances. It was a cliche, but it was also true. Some of the football they had been playing had been superb. The build up play was all there. His big money signing, Filip Djordjevic, was regularly bursting past defenders to be played in for a one-on-one with the goalkeeper, but time after time he had skied his shot. None had been saved or turned around the post. Every attempt was blazed high and over by the Serbian. His technically-adept midfield had their opportunities too but no one seemed to understand how to position themselves properly or time their attempts to beat their onrushing markers. Shot after shot cannoned off a chest or leg sent to block the ball. It was happening too often to be a case of poor fortune, and yet he had set himself up as the shooting specialist on the training field. At Twente, his insights had made every single one of his players a danger man. Torgeir Børven had no business being a 30-goal-a-season striker before he got his hands on him. No Bordeaux had managed more than two goals in 12 games in Ligue 1.

It was barely five o'clock in the morning when he woke up with a start. A crucial home match against Lyon lingered on the horizon for Saturday, just three days away. He got up to check on the kids. His wife barely stirred. Although they weren't taking to life in their new city as well as he had hoped, it was clear his own mood was feeding back into the feelings of his family. They could see he was stressed, full of doubt and uncertain about his choices over the summer. Maybe this was all a big leap forward taking too quickly and with too short a run-up? If he was going to inspire his disbelieving team at the weekend, such thoughts needed to be put to one side. The children were asleep. He wouldn't be able to get back to bed now. Anyway, he'd need to be at the training ground in a few hours anyway. His bizarre, unpopular tactics weren't going force feed themselves into the minds of his unwilling guinea pigs.

What would Saturday bring? Hopefully a sense of clarity, one way or the other.