It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to rest players for a Champions League tie – even if it is just the group stage – so as to keep them fresh for the domestic league. Especially if it is your captain.
But that is exactly what Chelsea manager
Andre Villas-Boas did against Bayer Leverkusen, keeping
John Terry out of the squad altogether. In hindsight it looks like a brilliant decision, with three points and a clean sheet in the bag, ahead of Sunday's clash with Premier League champions Manchester United.
But Villas-Boas's reasons for omitting the England captain were curious. Sure, he wanted his veteran defender fresh and ready to face Sir
Alex Ferguson's free-flowing side, but his decision to keep Terry out of the action and
Frank Lampard on the bench was motivated by something else.
He wanted to keep them on their toes, apparently. Or as Villas-Boas put it: "It would be a mistake not to try and keep everybody motivated. That's the task of any manager. I don't see any braveness in it. I'm sure the players have not suffered from it as a result in the past."
Call us old-fashioned, but we would propose that a heart-on-sleeve defender who attempts to play on having been booted in the head and is only missing the Champions League in his laden medal drawer doesn't need much in the way of extra motivation.
But that may be just us. Villas-Boas clearly knows what his players need and more crucially, what he wants from them.
And in dropping two of his key men, he has succeeded in showing the world he is no pushover, as if there was any doubts in the first place. He may be only 33 – younger than some of his players – but he has made it clear he is in charge.
His display of authority was displayed in dropping the pair, but his show of strength was more evident in his explanation. He is a master at saying a lot of words while divulging little, so when he was asked about Lampard and Terry, he could have trotted out something like "in terms of the physicality of the team and the tactics, I opted for the most emphatic solution".
But he didn't. He went straight for the jugular: "to keep them motivated". As if to say, that's you told. And any other player around them – like a certain Fernando Torres, who escaped censure but got a stern talking-to after he publicly called his team mates old and slow – will have been under no illusions as to who is in charge.
