Villas-Boas revels in feelgood factor

The image of the week was Gareth Bale jumping into the arms of Andre Villas-Boas after scoring the late winning goal against West Ham United on Monday. As the pair embrace, in the background two of Tottenham Hotspur's coaches, Luis Martins and Jose Mario Rocha, prepare to join in.

It is a moment that says everything about Spurs under Villas-Boas and about the head coach himself. But it is also wholly consistent with the type of manager he is - he was like this at Porto, and before that Academica and he attempted to be like this when he was at Chelsea only to meet bitter resistance.

Derided, wrongly, as some kind of callow automaton, ridiculed as a "geek", a coach who has learnt by numbers and a slave to the laminated sheets of information that he took with him to media briefings - he was completely misread.

The sheets did not contain statistical data on player performance and reams of figures gleaned from ProZone (as Villas-Boas revealed last week, he is extremely suspicious of such stats and information-gathering). The sheets usually just had the Premier League table, forthcoming fixtures and the first-team squad's training schedules.

And while Villas-Boas plans every coaching session carefully and tries to ensure every one is different and tailored to what the players need, it is because he is reacting to them as human beings. Villas-Boas is a far more intuitive and emotional manager than has been portrayed. Indeed he recently travelled to Gateshead to take part in a charity event to mark what would have been the 80th birthday of Sir Bobby Robson, who he regards as having been a far greater influence than Jose Mourinho.

Robson was an emotional, passionate coach, as is Mourinho of course, although he lacks spontaneity. He may have privately complained about the overly-emotional nature of English football while at Chelsea, because it brought such a random element to proceedings, with scorelines overturned in an instant, but he has always been a team-builder relying on instinct.

And Villas-Boas likes to talk. He has spent hours talking to his players individually, plugging into their personalities, the things they like and the things that inspire them and he has capitalised on the fact that here was a hungry young squad desperate for success, just as he is.

Villas-Boas is also a speed freak. He is happiest when he has the chance to drive the racing car he had custom-built when he lost his job at Chelsea, or taking to a motorbike and going into the hills in Portugal.

His dream is to be a participant in the Paris-Dakar rally.

But he is not in a hurry even if he has spoken about only wanting a "short" coaching career.

Villas-Boas has also adapted. He was undoubtedly chastened by what happened at Chelsea and he admitted on Friday, ahead of today's north London derby at home to Arsenal, that: "I feel a different manager and a different person".

Until the Chelsea debacle there had been an extraordinarily rapid upward trajectory to his career and he had that invincibility of youth that meant he always believed he was right. While Villas-Boas has held on to the principles, he has also learnt and learnt quickly. But then he is remarkably bright. Villas-Boas has also learnt how to tap into his strong sense of humour - something those who meet him for the first time are surprised he possesses.

Villas-Boas is also caringly interested in the collective. It is most definitely not about individual glory. Knowing that he had thought about a career in sports journalism, I once asked him what he would have written about the success he achieved in Portugal. "I'd probably write something about how important it is for me to share my success with the people from the top to the bottom of this club," he said.

While he desperately wants to win - and it is all about trophies for him - he has also accepted that a club like Spurs has specific targets: this season it is to finish in the top four and qualify for the Champions League; next season it is to mount a Premier League title challenge. But it is no surprise to see Spurs make such a big effort in the Europa League - a competition, by the way, in which he is yet to lose a tie.

Villas-Boas will wait and see what he can reflect upon at the end of this campaign in which he has already done so much to revise opinions - some brutally unfair - delivered on him when he left Chelsea. And he has not forgotten what was said.

But there was also one article that struck those close to Villas-Boas and it was written in the Irish editions of The Sun newspaper by Roy Keane who tentatively compared his 257 days at Chelsea with Brian Clough's infamous 44 days in charge of Leeds United before he eventually achieved so much success at Nottingham Forest. "I'm not saying that he's going to turn Tottenham into European champions like Clough did with Nottingham Forest," Keane wrote. "Just that his time in charge at Stamford Bridge need not define him as a manager."