The cascade of tributes that followed Terry Venables’s death last week all circled around a single quality that made the former England, Spurs, and Barcelona manager a coach of such glinting gifts: charisma. El Tel’s legendary talent as a man manager, tactician and crooner, and even his notorious failures as a wig salesman and publican, were all an expression of this basic trait, his barrow-boy charm and scheming wit.
As a species, up-and-at-’em managers such as Venables – artful dodgers reinvented as practitioners of the flexible 4-4-2 – may have gone the way of the upfield hoof, but the basic alchemy that explains their unique strength – the quality of charisma – is very much still with us.
