Juande Ramos eyes return to the glory, glory years

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From The Sunday Times
March 9, 2008

Juande Ramos eyes return to the glory, glory years
The Spaniard has given Spurs a lift – and a trophy – since his arrival and has definite plans for the future at White Hart Lane

Ian Hawkey

Black trousers, black shoes, charcoal jersey, jet-black hair and a face that, until it breaks into one of his occasional thin smiles, can always seem severe, Juande Ramos looked like a man dressed for mourning on Friday. Something to do with the previous evening’s defeat at home by PSV Eindhoven? No, he was quick to assure. Yes, a few words had been said to the Tottenham Hostpur players at practice about the night before, but more were spoken about the return leg in Holland next Wednesday.

“We look forward, rather than back,” said Ramos, “and it was about motivating the players and lifting them back up again.” Ramos has been lifting Spurs for the past four and a half months, from a position in the relegation zone when he took over from Martin Jol at the end of October to a chance today to move closer to the top half of the Premier League table and make up ground on their opponents, West Ham United. Ramos talks about a steady rise, “these little steps”, and would have us give each one of them the same attention as granted to the more prominent endorsement of Tottenham’s progress, the triumph in the Carling Cup a fortnight ago, the club’s first trophy this century. Enough basking had been done over that, he suggested, acknowledging symptoms of the Cup victory having clouded subsequent fixtures. Since coming from a goal down to beat Chelsea at Wembley, Spurs have lost twice, the first sequence of defeats since Ramos took over, and it was time to arrest that blip.

“Possibly, the two things are linked,” he reckoned. “Winning that Cup was such a big thing for the fans and something the players really wanted for the fans, and maybe afterwards we have lacked the necessary intensity in our game.”

Sitting in his office at Spurs’ training ground to talk over his season so far, Ramos was anything but fazed by the recent downturn. It is not his way to give the impression that anything is unsalvageable, that too much has gone against his overall plan, although the idea that since he assumed the pilot’s seat he immediately charted the precise course that Tottenham should follow, first to ensure Premier League safety and then at the earliest opportunity – via the Carling Cup – put themselves back in Europe would be farfetched. The journey so far has had many rollercoaster moments: four goals – all for Spurs – on his home Premier League debut; five in his next match at White Hart Lane – a defeat – a 5-1 win on Boxing Day; a 10-goal thriller three days later. Those who know Ramos best, talk a good deal about his calm. Spurs had tested it thoroughly during his initiation.

A studious manager, he reckons he knew Tottenham pretty well before he came – the courtship had been long as well as clumsily handled by Spurs – but acknowledges than in the early weeks, “there were one or two things that surprised me, some good, some not so good” and that there were “fundamentals that needed changing”. He felt reluctant to give too many details lest it sound like a criticism of the former regime, but agreed that fitness had been a priority. And food, about which much had been said? “We simply introduced what we thought is the right sort of diet,” he shrugged. What he will say is that he hoped self-belief had grown, with victories over Arsenal and Chelsea, albeit in the League Cup, an indication that Tottenham, fifth-place finishers in the past two Premier League seasons, had begun to think they could live with the so-called Big Four. “I am now sure that we don’t feel inferior to anybody. We do go out on the field thinking that we can win these sorts of matches, believe that we have a very good chance in all these sorts of games. It’s a process that goes step by step, and I think the players are understanding more and more what we want from them. Psychology is important, just like technique, tactics, fitness and everything else. You want players who are clear about what they are doing and what you want from them and listen, when I say to the players that we do have the ability to beat anybody, it’s because I believe it, and that’s what I see in the squad we have.”

The psychology is an interest he shares with his wife – she is a psychologist – although not to the extent that he takes his notes home. “I don’t really mix work and family life,” he said, besides which the process of discovering a new country after 54 years in Spain, 15 of them spent coaching there, had been absorbing. There were just two things about England that had not yet won him over. “The cold, and I still prefer Spanish food to English,” he said. The language is coming along nicely, helped by television. Had he found a favourite programme? “Benny Hill,” suggested one of his assistants with a giggle. “The news,” corrected Ramos, with a brief smile, but evident concern lest he be taken for a devotee of low-brow slapstick; he is not.

His English has made progress enough “to talk to the players in English, although Gus Poyet [his assistant] sometimes helps with translation if there are particular things I want to say”. Poyet, the Uruguayan who used to play for Spurs, complements his boss in other ways, too, a jauntier presence than Ramos. So far, the Tottenham manager’s public utterances since he came to England have been relayed via interpreter; inevitably that lends a sense of distance. Once he no longer needs a translator, he may still come across as remote. Even in Spanish, he chooses his words with caution. Even back in Spain, he almost always has. At certain times in his career, it was supposed this may have held him back.

Famously, the president of Real Betis, where he worked five seasons ago, replaced him by declaring he had hired the equivalent of “a Mercedes instead of a Renault”. How did he look back on that snub? “As a curiosity,” said Juande Ramos, smiling. What did he think when people in Spain muttered that he was not media-friendly enough? “It has no effect.” He likes the fact that in his new job he has given the media less thought: “I find there’s much less media around you all the time. Every day in Spain, there’s radio, TV, newspapers, and here I find there is less time in my schedule taken up with it.”

His salary must be a lot more comfortable, too? The market decided that, he answered, and he had not “spent a second’s thought” on whether or not he was, as is speculated, the best paid club coach in the world. Ramos is earning what only Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain could even contemplate paying a coach, and theirs had never been jobs for which he was a candidate, despite his success in taking Sevilla to successive Uefa Cups and into the Champions League.

Did he feel appreciated within Spanish football? “I think what I have done is recognised, yes.” Did he think it was easier to be a foreign manager in England than to get a top Spanish job as a Spaniard? “I have an opinion on that but I’m going to keep it to myself.” Some of this sensitivity would be a consequence of the circumstances around his departure from Sevilla to Tottenham. He is reluctant to be quoted on anything that might be taken as embittered because there was sourness when he left Spain. His former club had been unhappy that he quit during the season rather than after it. Ramos feels “it was the right time to make a change and my friends and family would agree with that”. Had he watched Sevilla being knocked out of the Champions League on penalties last Tuesday? He had kept on eye on it. Had he been saddened? “I’m focused on Tottenham. I don’t tend to worry about other teams because of that.” What he had at Tottenham was more power than he had known before, more say in how his club should proceed in the transfer market. “I’m happy with the role I have here. We work as a team of four and try and come to joint decisions with the directors. But compared with Sevilla, I have more say in the decisions about signings.” Would there be many come the summer? “That depends a lot on where we finish in the league. We are in mid-competition now and we’re still looking at performances and so on. Obviously I inherited a squad that had already been built and it was mid-season so we had no real chance to touch up on things we may not have liked. Next time we will have a chance to say what we want. What we are all trying to do is to get to that level of the top four. You do that by signing good players.”

His achievement with Sevilla, whom he took to third in La Liga in his second season, had been the precedent that drew Spurs to him. “It is similar in a way,” he acknowledged. “Sevilla were also a club who weren’t in a position economically to sign the very biggest stars, but we were able to reach that level. At Tottenham, we were second or third from bottom when I arrived and we had to make a great effort to move up out of those positions. It’s practically impossible that we are going to get up towards the top four this season but we are going to fight to get into the European positions, even though we are already qualified for Europe via the Carling Cup.”

The difference, though, between taking Sevilla to third and Spurs to fourth was that Spain’s top flight tended to be more fluid just below the summit – nine different Spanish teams have finished in La Liga’s top four in the past five years – than the Premier League “We can see the power of English football looking at the Champions League now. I think it’s the strongest league, but Spain’s is more even.”

The neighbours were closer here. Today, another all-London meeting. “These derbies clearly get the fans going in a special way,” said Ramos, “and I love the atmosphere at these games, the way everybody arrives so much in advance of the kick-off, unlike most matches in Spain. To an extent I have to prepare the players independently of all the derby element.”

But only to an extent: Spurs have become good at London derbies lately, one of several good habits acquired in the short, eventful reign of Juande Ramos.

How the Ramos effect spurred Tottenham into life

— Spurs stood 18th in the Premier League when Juande Ramos took over at the end of October. They were 11th going into this weekend. Of his 16 league matches in charge, he has won seven and drawn four. Spurs are also the fifth-highest scorers in the league, despite being in the lower half of the table

— Ramos’s coaching team found some Spurs players overweight when they arrived. ‘We realised that the team was carrying excess baggage,’ said fitness coach Marcos Alvarez. ‘I made a very simple comparison with the Seville team that we had been working with and the team was basically 100kg too heavy’

— Tottenham won the League Cup a fortnight ago. En route, Ramos oversaw a semi-final triumph over London rivals Arsenal, including a 5-1 win in the home leg. Spurs are still in the Uefa Cup, but face a 1-0 deficit when they travel to PSV Eindhoven on Wednesday in search of a quarter-final place