Age of Consent

It's all about the age difference today, and I'm not talking about the contrast between our youth and Chelsea's ageing squad.  No the papers have quotes from the two press conferences yesterday and they concentrate on the differences between the 33 year old Chelsea manager and  69 year old Sir Alex.

The Independent concentrate on what Sir Alex was doing when he was Andre Villa-Boas's age:

"I was actually 32 when I started at East Stirling," Ferguson reflected. "But it was only a part-time team I was taking over. The players were on about £5 a week." Ferguson was himself earning around £40 a week and, as he always loves to relate, with his first season three weeks away he had only eight players and no goalkeeper.

"When I went to Aberdeen, I was maybe 36," Ferguson recalled. "Bobby Clark, the goalkeeper, was maybe 33. When I went to St Mirren I had Ian Ure [two years older]. I got him the job at East Stirling to replace me. I think Ian is still working in a borstal in Ayrshire somewhere."

And have Sir Alex warning against young managers in general, or at least arguing for experience:

"If you go back a few years, clubs were giving jobs to players who were just finishing their careers – Trevor Francis, Ray Wilkins," he said. "They were going from playing to managing top teams. That, to me, was quite surprising. It seemed to be a trend at the time to have younger managers.

"That's changed now and experienced managers are coming to the fore again – look at Roy Hodgson and Harry Redknapp. I'm more pleased that experienced managers are being highlighted than young managers. The young managers' time will come. 

The Guardian have Villa-Boas recalling Sir Alex's and his first meeting:

It will be billed as the first brush between the Premier League's elder statesman and the young pretender, the flashbulbs popping frenziedly as the odd couple share a pre-match handshake at Old Trafford, yet the awkward formal introductions have already taken place in far less auspicious surroundings. Somewhere in the bowels of Uefa's headquarters this month, Sir Alex Ferguson emerged from the gents just as André Villas-Boas was trundling in. The initial meeting of minds took place right there.

The Portuguese was making his first appearance at the Elite Club Coaches' forum in Nyon, the small-talk taking him from Pep Guardiola to Massimiliano Allegri, Arsène Wenger to Didier Deschamps. "Sir Alex was coming out of the loo and I was just there," recalled Villas-Boas. "We said hello and spoke about something … Stoke, funnily enough. Stoke were one of the main discussion points of the elite clubs' meeting."

And Sir Alex on the possibility of Villa-Boas bringing Chelsea the title:

"It will be an incredible achievement," he said when asked what it would mean should Villas-Boas win the title this term. "That somebody so young could go and do that would be incredible. You can't dispute that." 

Henry Winter in The Telegraph makes it a class war as well as an age war:

A former shop steward against a scion of Portuguese nobility. A 69 year-old with a young team against a 33 year-old trying to rejuvenate an old team.

Moving on, and Daniel Taylor has an article looking at Anderson's return to form in The Guardian.  My main problem with it is that it makes it sound like the start of this season is the first time Anderson has played well since 2007:

Back in 2007 United went to Anfield and it was another 19-year-old, Anderson, who delivered the kind of performance that, for Ferguson, represented one of those moments when all the sweat and frustration and hardships of management felt worthwhile. Anderson did something that day that has rarely been achieved at the home of Liverpool: he dominated Steven Gerrard on his own patch. The first 50-50 set the tone. Anderson snapped into Gerrard's ankles and came away with the ball. The second time it happened, Gerrard fixed him with a stare. It was a look that said: "And you are?"

What has happened to Anderson over the following years demonstrates how quickly a young player's priorities can blur and why some of the greatest qualities a manager can possess are patience and tolerance. Fortunately for the Brazilian, Ferguson has equal measures of both. But it has been a close-run thing at times and in the worst moments, it was difficult to envisage the situation we have seen this week, of Anderson being deemed so important for a weekend fixture the manager rested him from a Champions League tie.

Patient as Sir Alex might be, I'm not sure he'd have been so patient if that game in 2007 was actually his last decent game.  The problem was always consistency with Anderson, the odd brilliant game broken by average performances.  So Taylor mentions, elsewhere in the article, the Champions League final against Barcelona when Anderson didn't perform, but he ignores the performances in earlier rounds that helped us get to that final.

The Daily Star speculates that Berba might be on his way in January.  The type of guesswork I'd expect from The Mirror...

Speaking of which, The Mirror reckon Solskjaer as new Blackburn manager. The one quote in the article, from his agent:

"Blackburn Rovers have a manager," he said. "And Ole is doing very well in Norway."

The Sun have an interview with Rooney, I'll just quote a little bit:

That [scoring a third hat-trick] would be unbelievable but I can't afford to think about that.

It's a tough enough match as it is and United winning is far more important than me trying to score another hat-trick, so that's where all my energy will be focused.

Worth a look, though nothing too spectacular in it.

Better is The Independent's interview with Gary Neville, a snippet:

"But you don't stay at Manchester United for 25 years and have the players that he has had by shouting at them," Neville insists. "You do have to show a personal side. If you asked me how much of his 25 years there has been spent angry, I would probably say 0.001 per cent. The rest of the time he is a manager. You see him 99.9 per cent of the time on the training pitch. Every day he is talking to players about football, different things, how it went with internationals, normal conversations. He does have a streak, there is no doubt about that, and I think everyone is aware of that and it is something. But this idea that he's always ready to let someone have it is wrong."

Last story.  On the money.  Essence of the story, in The Guardian, Singapore flotation is on, but who knows when - Glazers might wait for better conditions.