The appointment of André Villas-Boas as the new Chelsea manager last week raised a few eyebrows, mine most certainly included.

I don’t doubt the young Portuguese man is a hot prospect in coaching terms, and his achievements with Porto last season were particularly impressive.

But I still see his move to the Stamford Bridge hot seat as a major gamble by the London club.

Villas-Boas, or AVB as he is apparently known, is still only 33, and that makes him younger than some of the players he is expect to manage. His experience of coaching at the top level is essentially limited to a season-and-a-half. Prior to that he was very much backroom staff, working mostly as a scout under José Mourinho.

Another of AVB’s quirks is that he is a ‘career coach’ – a member of that very rare breed of managers who has never actually played the game professionally.

Of course, never having played football doesn’t mean he is not going to be a good coach. As Arrigo Sacchi, another career coach, once famously said: “I wasn’t aware that to be a good jockey you had to have been a horse.”

But I am sure it makes life harder when, as someone who has never been there and done it, you are trying to tell a hardened pro how it should be done. There is bound to be some resistance to that.

Another reason I see this as an appointment with ‘risky’ written all over it, is the issue of patience. AVB looks like the sort of man who has plenty of it while his new boss is a man who doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

For Villas-Boas to get things right at Stamford Bridge I suspect it is going to take him years, not months. He has inherited an ageing team, with its backbone – John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drgoba – entering the last few kicks of their career. A rebuilding process will need to be carried out, and by its very nature, that is something that can’t be done overnight.

However, we all know Roman Abramovich is not the sort of man who likes to sit around waiting for things to happen. As I’m pretty sure the likes of Luiz Felipe Scolari and Carlo Ancelloti will vouch for.

If the Russian is expecting instant success then I feel he may end up disappointed, as will those Chelsea fans that have now become used to life challenging at the top of the game on a regular basis.

More than any of that though, the thing that makes me wonder about this appointment more than anything else is how AVB’s stock has risen so dramatically, so quickly and on the back of a single, admittedly brilliant, season.

It’s not as if he has been achieving great things on a regular basis over the years is it?

He took over Porto last summer and led them to a league title, league cup and Europe League treble. But who is to say he would have built on that success or even maintained it next season?

The simple truth is nobody knows enough about the man as a manager to say how he copes when things aren’t going well, how he deals with long-term injuries to key players or how he handles the pressure of serious expectations.

Reports suggest he is an intelligent and meticulous coach who embraces technology and who has moulded himself on Mourinho’s man-management style but without the arrogance.

But he is still very much a managerial work-in-progress, and giving him the job marks a distinct detour from Abramovich’s previous policy of appointing the very tried and extremely tested.

The key for me is whether or not he can get the likes of Terry and Lampard on board. Although they are starting the winding-down process on their careers, I believe they still have a vital role to play for at least the next season.

If they give the new boss their support and backing then AVB could buy himself enough time to get his feet under the desk and do his rebuilding. If, however, they don’t, then the young manager could find himself struggling from the word go, his age and inexperience being waved in his face every time something goes wrong.

Personally I would like to see him succeed. He has given off an aura of calm, modest determination in these first few days of his Chelsea career and I quite like the idea of being able to succeed as a manager even if you never made it as a player.

It would means there is still hope for my midlife career change…

Who would make team GB?

Like many, I am following the ongoing saga of the British football team for next year’s Olympics with interest.

The issue stems from the fact that the whole of Britain competes as a single entity during the games. However, there is no such thing as a ‘British’ football team – instead there are four individual ones: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The obvious solution would be for the four associations to combine and send a united team to the games. However, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are afraid that would ultimately undermine their autonomy in the eyes of Fifa and lead to their exclusion from the world of football.

Despite assurances to the contrary from Fifa, these three associations are still nervous, as all they have is a letter of assurance from the executive committee and we all know that’s not the most concrete of things at the moment.

The current compromise seems to be that the English FA will run the British team at the Olympics but they will be free to choose players from any of the home nations. And those players in turn will not face any sanctions from their respective associations if they turn out for Britain at the Olympics.

What gets me is how this situation has not been resolved sooner. It’s not as if any of those four countries, Fifa, the International Olympic Committee or the games’ organisers didn’t see this coming. It’s been a potential problem since London won the right to host the games back in July 2005 – that’s almost exactly six years ago.

You would have thought this football conundrum would have been towards the top of their things-to-be-sorted-out-quickly list back then. Yet only last week does it appear to have finally been concluded. Or at least, almost concluded.

At this point, however, a question that needs asking is exactly how many players from non-English associations are likely to be called up for a Team GB?

The Olympic rules state that the squads must be made up of players under 23 years of age, with just three overage players allowed. And that automatically reduces the pool somewhat.

Now, assuming the squad is picked on talent and not using some politically correct geographical weighting system, I can’t think of many players from Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales who would make the grade.

Gareth Bale and Joe Ledley spring to mind, but not too many others. That’s not being offensive to any of those nations, just honest.

And, given that it would look like they are going against the wishes of their association, how many would accept the call if it came?

All in all, I feel it would have been simpler just to enter an English team under the British flag from the word go. Or better still, not even bother entering a British team in the football event at all.

With the restrictions on the squad and the limited number of participating nations, it’s not like this is a serious Olympic event anyway.

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com
Twitter: @maltablade