Greatest Of All Legends

Chapter 819: Have No Fear, Conte is Here

***31st October 2021***

A small thud filled a large room as a formally dressed man in a suit threw a news paper on the table.

"Fans boo off players and manager after 3-0 loss to Man Utd," another man in one of the chairs around the table grabbed the paper and read aloud the headlines on the front page.

"..."

"We have to make a decision, minimize the damage because what happened yesterday must not happen ever again," the club chairman, Daniel Levy said from the head of the table.

"How do we do that?"

"I mean sure, the performances haven’t been the best, but no one’s really at fault here," Fabio, the director of football at the club asked confused.

"Seriously, no one?" a member of the board questioned sarcastically.

"Well, not no one. But we can’t really point fingers,"

"We hired Nuno despite knowing he played defensive football. The same defensive football we had just sacked Mourinho for because the fans didn’t like it,"

"Since we didn’t find another replacement and we thought that since it wasn’t totally defensive football, then we would be okay and we were," Fabio defended.

"We weren’t okay. We’ve lost five out of ten Premier league games," someone countered.

"..."

"So you want to give him the sack?" Fabio asked, directing the question to Levy at the head of the table.

There was nothing he could say to defend Nuno after all because despite it being as much of the players’s fault as it was the manager, these people would argue that since the manager couldn’t even convince the players to give their hundred in his style of play, then there was no point keeping him.

And despite making sure they hadn’t been disqualified from any competitions, Nuno’s results weren’t convincing enough to make the board stand behind him.

As of now, he was going to be the scapegoat for this situation and that was all there would be to it.

"All those in favor of changing the manager?" Daniel Levy put the decision making to his board, but he knew that they had a similar mind to his.

Just as he expected, the decision was in favor of sacking the manager and after giving orders on how the news would be broken and order to advance talks with those on the manager shortlist that they had prepared a while ago, the meeting ended.

Thus the Tottenham fans and the players woke up to the news that the manager and his entire team had been sacked.

An interesting thing to note was that there wasn’t an appointed interim manager which meant that there was a replacement already lined up so they would only have to wait, and the didn’t even have to wait long.

Barely a day after, Antonio Conte was announced as the new man at the helm of the Tottenham team to which Jason thought, ’Oh, that guy.’

Jason didn’t have much of a relationship with Conte despite having met and denied the man the Scudetto just months prior.

In fact, Jason’s relationship with the guy was more negative than neutral. Jason had cause him to lose a few trophies and it was Skriniar under Conte’s management who had injured Jason and cost Jason the Europa League in his first season with Oporto.

All that was behind them now and there was never any hard feelings, but Jason felt relieved at the fact that the club was bringing in a good manager with a track record for winning things.

It could only get better from here? Right?

While Jason was thinking all this, Antonio Conte had arrived in England and was already at the club’s head office discussing the arrangement for his coaching team with the director of football.

One of his negotiation points was for him to bring in his own people and since the club had just sacked Nuno and his coaching team, it wasn’t much of an issue because the positions were open now.

After that was done, the manager was taking to Hotspur way to continue the rest of his introduction to the club.

At the club he was briefed about the current squad. The full files of the players were sent to him so he could go through them and know what he had to work with.

Safe to say, he had his work cut out for him, especially as he planned to play a different type of football from what the players were currently used to.

After a quick tour of the training ground, he left so he could go through the files and prepare for the first day of training as there wasn’t much time.

The team’s next match, his debut, was in just two days so he had to get to work fast.

***3rd November 2021***

The Tottenham players arrived at Hotspur way for their first training with the new manager. Jason had been expecting a somewhat somber mood among the players as they headed to the training field, but most of the guys were acting as they normally did.

Or maybe they were somber and just trying not to show it, he couldn’t really tell as he wasn’t especially somber either.

He barely knew Nuno Santos and had only played two games under the man so they weren’t especially close or anything and though Jason felt sorry that he had been made a scapegoat and faced the brunt of the team’s poor performances, there wasn’t much that could be done about it.

It was for the best anyways. The team wasn’t really united behind Nuno’s tactics and that would have been a problem even if he stayed longer.

"So how’s he like?" Kane asked Jason.

"I don’t know, I didn’t play under him, only met him a few times and even then we didn’t talk much to each other. You may have met him more than me even,"

"Didn’y you go up against him when he was at Chelsea?" Jason returned the question to Kane.

"I also don’t know him that much. I just know he’s pretty good and he always uses three man defense formations," Kane replied.

"Yeah yeah, but he doesn’t play defensively, his tactics are really good," Son added.

"That’s about as much as I know, but I also know that he’s Italian," Jason said with a bitter smile.

"What does that mean?" Son asked curiously.

"Y’all are about to lose all sensations in your legs."