Alain Perrin watched the past round of Champions League games from the comfort of his favourite armchair in his Port Solent home. His choice of match was Bruges vs Rapid Vienna, ”because Portsmouth won’t be buying anyone from AC Milan”. Two years earlier, Perrin had been an integral part of the action.
Having spurned the advances of French champions Lyon, Perrin took over at Marseille and led his new club into Europe’s most prestigious competition, against all expectations, in his first year in charge.
In late 2003, the former PE teacher was leading out Marseille against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu, and preparing for the visit of Jose Mourinho’s Porto to the cauldron they call the Velodrome.
How things have changed. Gone are the all-mod-cons of Marseille’s splendid Commanderie training centre, gone too the chance to measure his wiles against teams such as Real Madrid.
Perrin (49) is in charge of a Portsmouth team that trains on fields rented from a local school, where the clapped-out dressing rooms are better suited to parks football, and where the physio operates out of a Portakabin. Today’s reality is Fratton Park, the fight against relegation and being hot favourite to become the first managerial casualty of the Premiership season.
According to the latest whispers, George Burley has turned down the job and Neil Warnock has been lined up by chairman Milan Mandaric to take Perrin’s place. Some say the emergence of Warnock’s name is a ploy to raise the stakes for a new contract at Sheffield United, but one hard fact is that the odds on Perrin’s departure halved last week. When we meet at Portsmouth’s Eastleigh training ground, though, the imposing Frenchman is disarmingly serene.
”I know my chairman has a reputation for firing managers, but we work very well together. He is a football connoisseur, very convivial, a passionate, frank and honest man. But who knows what’s around the corner? Maybe your article will turn into a post-mortem.” He laughs.
”As a manager, I have learned that when things are going well you can be only three months from the sack, and when things are going badly you can be a week away.
”What counts for me is to be able to say I have no regrets. My job is to prepare my players, my team, to the best of my ability. What gives me serenity is knowing I have done everything within my power. But there are some things you just can’t control. Maybe I’ll end up being fired because Lomana LuaLua didn’t take his malaria tablets. Had he played in all our games, he might have snuck the goals that turned our draws into wins.”
Mandaric gave Perrin a target last month of six points from Ports-mouth’s games against Middlesbrough, Charlton, Sunderland and Wigan. He garnered four. Portsmouth have not won at home, and their next four opponents are Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United and Tottenham. Far from being daunted, Perrin looks forward to those games.
”When things aren’t going well, then you are even busier than usual,” he says. ”What’s wrong? How can I fix it? Maybe it’s a masochistic streak, but I love to be intellectually challenged, to be forced into finding solutions. Really, having problems is not a problem for me.”
When Perrin does leave, the thought of moving will be the least of his worries. As one of four children of a French air force officer, he led a nomadic life, living for three years in Chad before settling in Nancy. Perrin, a central defender, played amateur football and coached children in his spare time while studying to be a PE teacher. He had no notions of taking it any further — until Michel Platini’s father telephoned him.
Aldo Platini, in charge of the academy at Nancy, was looking for help. When Platini senior retired, Perrin took over. During his five-year stint, Perrin worked under two managers at Nancy whose names would soon be familiar: Arsène Wenger and Aime Jacquet. Perrin began to get a reputation.
Troyes, who had fallen on hard times in the old fourth division, wanted him as manager and he became the only paid man at the club. Perrin took them all the way to the top division. After staying up on the last day of their first season, Troyes twice finished seventh, giving Perrin his first taste of European football via the Intertoto Cup, in which they played Newcastle and Leeds. When Perrin left for Marseille, Troyes were relegated.
Marseille, by far the most football-crazy city in France, was soon under the Perrin spell. The club where Chris Waddle, Abedi Pele and Jean-Pierre Papin had brought glory in the early 1990s had fallen into mayhem. Perrin’s rigorous approach worked wonders: they finished third. With hindsight, he says now, he did too well, too soon.
Perrin delved into the transfer market and came up with two pearls: Mido and, better still, Didier Drogba. Drogba was an instant hit with the locals, only for things to go awry following Marseille’s 4-2 defeat at Real Madrid. Perrin had harsh words for his players, accusing them publicly of not following the game-plan. Dissent grew and soon the spats were leaking out to the papers. Perrin decided to take on the press.
”A mistake,” he says. ”I succeeded only in making things harder for myself.” With the players divided into pro- and anti-Perrin lobbies, pressure grew as results began to slide. In January, he was fired.
Marseille were six points behind the leaders with two games in hand (against lowly sides Metz and Montpellier, Perrin hastily reminds me). His team had lost to the future Champions League semifinalists (Real) and winners (Porto) and would go on to reach the Uefa Cup final, eliminating Liverpool and Newcastle on the way.
Perrin was well out of the picture by then, and having to face up to Marseille’s claims that they sacked him for improper conduct including sexual harassment, which he forcefully denies.
Before turning up at Portsmouth in March to replace Harry Redknapp, Perrin had a brief stint with Al-Ain in the United Arab Emirates and declined a number of ”exotic offers”, including the Cameroon job. At Portsmouth, he finds himself with a pretty exotic squad: 17 nationalities.
”They are all just players — I don’t look at their passports.
”I’ve not been able to pick my best team once this season. There’s always someone injured or ill. And then players like Diao, Silva, Priske and Vukic all arrived right at the end of August, so we don’t have players with the same levels of fitness.”
It will get worse in January when four players, among them LuaLua, head off to the African Nations Cup and miss up to four league games.
Portsmouth have had a problem scoring goals, with plenty of chances created but not enough quality in the penalty area to take advantage.
”Collins Mbesuma has a real goalscorer’s touch,” Perrin says of the Zambian striker of whom much was expected, but who has hardly played. ”He’s a deadly finisher in the box. The only problem is that at this level you have to be able to run to get into the opponents’ box, and he wasn’t really able to do that when he arrived. But he can prove very useful for us when he’s really fit.”
Perrin feels at home with the English game and its culture. ”I enjoy the generosity in the effort. It’s very intense, very physical and emotional too. There are duels, combats. I take pleasure from that.”
One of those duels has been with Laurent Robert, who has twice been in the headlines for the wrong reasons recently, for refusing to sit on the bench at Sunderland, then for criticising his teammates. Ports-mouth’s ever-loyal fans have lost patience with Robert, but Perrin’s relationship with the temperamental midfielder might yet be rescued.
”I’m accused sometimes of being authoritarian, when in fact I’m just demanding,” Perrin says. ”Top-level football is like jazz. You marvel at the improvisational skills of guys playing modern jazz, but to do what they do, both individually and as part of their group, they have to know how to play every note. Above all, they’re accomplished musicians. It’s knowing when to create. Because creation without framework, without any rules, can just leave you in a mess.
”Like in modern ballet or dance: again, the dancers are usually classically trained, they know all the steps, the movements. It’s only afterwards that they can be creative, put that knowledge to work for invention. Our training sessions at Portsmouth reflect that.
”I’ll have players working on drills, moves in little groups, repeating certain basics because it’s only once we have those staples nailed down that we can use them as a basis for building more creative play, get that liberty of expression.
”It takes time, but I have a good group here. I hope I get given the time.” — Â