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A game of football, just like any other. The pitch a little damp from the previous night’s rain. A bunch of blokes all charging in various indistinct directions, screaming cryptic aphorisms that will make very little sense to the disinterested observer, and barely more to those on the receiving end: “SQUEEZE!” “TWO HERE!” “WHO’S YOUR MAN?”
At the centre of it all, kitted out in the black and green of Southampton’s away colours, stands Mauricio Pellegrino, once of Liverpool, Barcelona, Valencia and Argentina. He retired as a professional more than a decade ago, and yet this remains his idea of perfect happiness. No points, no prizes. Just football.
When he was appointed Southampton manager over the summer, one of the first things he did was to organise a regular game on Thursdays or Fridays for the club staff, in which he would frequently take part. And so when the club’s sponsors, Virgin Media, asked whether he would be interested in assembling a club XI against a team of journalists, he leapt at the opportunity. For Pellegrino, the son of a provincial Argentinian farmer who might never have left his village without football, this game has always been a tool for bringing people together.
“When you play football,” he says, “you can change your habits. You can know people a little bit better. And you can talk a little bit more. Sometimes, in the biggest companies, there are a lot of areas where you don’t know the people that work in them. Football is something that is good to unite people, to think about togetherness, not just on the pitch, but off it too.”
It is a vocation that has become an addiction. These days, Pellegrino works in a billion-pound industry, where his every decision has a million unseen consequences, where time is short and reputations are cheap. But that essential love for the game has never left him. “From 10 years old,” he says, “all I wanted to do is work in football. I felt that whether you win or lose.”
This is why the precarious existence of the Premier League manager, brought into slightly sharper focus by Southampton’s indifferent start to the season, does not unduly trouble him. “Everything is a risk,” he says. “But the biggest risk is to be alive, no? When you’re on the motorway, you are taking a big risk. We cannot control the results, and that is part of life.”
Besides, Pellegrino is confident they will turn things around. They may be 13th, five places below where his predecessor Claude Puel finished last season, a performance not deemed sufficient to save him from the sack. They may have scored just nine goals in 11 games, and been eliminated from the Carabao Cup by Wolves at home. But he feels they are moving in the right direction.
“The dynamic of the training sessions is really good,” he says. “But we have to convert this progress into delivering more in the final third. We need a really, really high number of chances to convert into goals. I think we played better than our points show. Two or three points in the Premier League are massive. I think we are on the right track.”
He rejects the idea that a more offensive, less cautious approach is required. “Everything is connected,” he explains. “If you defend badly, it is really difficult to attack well. If you attack badly, it’s difficult to defend. We are a team that is comfortable when we manage the ball. I cannot imagine [Sofiane] Boufal, [Nathan] Redmond, [Manolo] Gabbiadini or Dusan Tadic behind the ball for 90 minutes.”
Southampton travel to Liverpool this weekend, a fixture freighted with significance for more reasons than one. It is the club where Pellegrino spent a largely forgettable six months in 2005 under his mentor Rafa Benitez, but more recently it has been the club trying to prise away - by common consent - Southampton’s best player.
Pellegrino will admit that Virgil van Dijk had his head turned by Liverpool’s interest during the summer. “Every single transfer window, clubs are looking to buy our players,” he says. “It’s no secret that sometimes players are distracted. But it’s normal. Virgil knows he is focused 100 per cent on our team, and is training well.”
For Pellegrino, the training ground is where truths are told, where the real work is done, where the dreams are forged. For him, coaching is a constant negotiation between the idea or the ideal he has in his mind, and what a player is capable of. “It’s like a medium point between them and my belief,” he explains. “At the end, in football there is no truth, there is belief.”
This is the sort of thinking that so intrigued Ross Wilson and Les Reed, Southampton’s head of scouting and executive director, when they sounded out Pellegrino to replace Puel this summer. “They told me that the club wants to grow,” says Pellegrino. “For me, that’s the most beautiful thing in life: to try and be better tomorrow than today.
“I played football from my childhood and I got the feeling of success, failure, to draw or win. When you win, you are happy for an hour. And then you have to train again. When you are champion, you are happy for a day. And after, you have to train again to try achieve another title. It’s part of our job, no?”
Southampton’s training ground at Marchwood, a small village just across the estuary from St Mary’s Stadium, is like a shrine to this philosophy. On a whiteboard in the first-team gym, the endurance and sprint speed numbers of every player are notched up for everyone to see. Van Dijk, Shane Long, and Matt Targett are three of the quickest. In the junior gym, an electronic screen displays a list of “Ten Academy Commandments”, ranging from clean boots to greeting visitors to “be honest, tell the truth”.
Everything is connected. From the size of the pitches (exactly the same dimensions as St Mary’s) to the layout of the campus (first team facilities nearest the hub, junior teams furthest away, to create a sense of progression) no detail has been spared in the search for maximum advantage. “The facilities here are the best around,” Pellegrino says. “I have everything to be happy.”
That word again. It crops up repeatedly in Pellegrino’s speech: a reminder that for all its ability to deliver salvation, redemption, vindication, profit, it is the ability to deliver happiness that really sets football apart.
That happiness can come in many forms. It can come from connecting with people. “The people have to be proud of your team,” Pellegrino says. “At full-time it is not always about the result, it is about the people’s feeling that 11 players are giving everything, every single game. Against Manchester United, we lost. But people were happy, because they could see the team were giving it everything.”
It can come from unexpected triumph, or a plan coming together. And sometimes, even when the pitch is still a little damp and the opposition of decidedly mixed quality, it can still come from slipping on a pair of boots and having a run around. He may be 46 and greying at the temples, but Pellegrino can still play a bit. He glides across a pitch where most of us can barely remain upright. He shamelessly nutmegs our star striker.
The Pellegrino XI win 2-0, and as hands are shaken, pleasantries exchanged, the normally stern face of Southampton’s manager is wreathed in smiles. His words are the words of a true addict. “I love my job,” he says. “I know there is a big pressure, a big risk, but I have to do it. All my life, it is the only thing I can do.”
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