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André Villas-Boas spoke of learning lessons from his Chelsea nightmare at his unveiling at Tottenham. And while the Life’s a Pitch team believes it’s essential he has if he wants to succeed at Spurs, opinion is mixed as to whether he is the right man to bring the glory days to White Hart Lane.

“He’s got to show that he’s learnt from that experience,” says the Daily Mirror’s Martin Lipton. ”Not that he’s got to change himself, but he’s got to be subtlety able to prove that there is a difference in the way he approaches it. That he has to be more consensual and less confrontational. One thing that’ll really help is that he hasn’t got an antagonistic dressing room at Spurs that he had at Chelsea. He hasn’t got people that because they’ve won something, they don’t need to be told. This lot haven’t won anything, so they do need to be told. They want to be led.”

But The People’s Dave Kidd is astonished Spurs have place their faith in Villas-Boas after his miserable time at Chelsea. ”I think it’s a massive, massive gamble to take on a man who has failed spectacularly at a bitter rival. It’s almost unthinkable to me. The fact that Villas-Boas came in is staggering. You’re going to have no honeymoon period whatsoever when you’ve come in with the baggage he’s had of failing spectacularly at a club where he had absolutely no idea how to manage people. This is a guy who was telling people that they had to come and celebrate with him after they scored a goal.”

Which isn’t an opinion shared by the Daily Telegraph’s Jason Burt. ”He made some terrible errors at Chelsea. But he was also put in an impossible position in a brutal dressing room with some incredibly powerful players who had a hotline to the owner of the club and they weren’t slow at complaining. And this is a young man who’s put in there on his own, with a technical director Michael Emenalo who had his own agenda and a board who weren’t strong enough to back him and an owner who was absent. He had players running rings around him at times.”

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