The Fiver | The sharpshooting spirit of João Saldanha

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A LITTLE LOCAL DIFFICULTY

Alex Ferguson, Bob Paisley, Ernst Happel, Jock Stein, César Luis Menotti, Helenio Herrera, Alf Ramsey, Herbert Chapman, Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Bela Guttman, Vittorio Pozzo, Graham Taylor. Some great football managers there. But if you were to ask the Fiver who was the greatest of all, you’d only get one answer: João Saldanha. He was the man who built Brazil’s 1970 World Cup-winning side, but never got to see the job through to completion after accusing Pelé of going blind, arguing viciously and stubbornly with the country’s tinpot dictator over team selection and chasing after his predecessor with a loaded pistol, having taken excessive umbrage at some mild criticism in the papers. Saldanha stood accused of being thin-skinned and emotionally unstable, the fact he had once been a football journalist perhaps the most damning evidence of all. He was dismissed and replaced by Mario Zagallo, and the rest is history. A hot-headed failed journalist, then. The Fiver loves him very much.

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