Paul Clement already has a response prepared for the Swansea City player that dares to show any disrespect towards him when they are substituted. Swansea’s new head coach will cast his mind back to the day when he was standing in for Carlo Ancelotti and hauled off Cristiano Ronaldo at the Bernabéu.
“I actually took him off, would you believe that?” Clement said, smiling. “In our very last game at Real Madrid, Carlo was serving a two-game suspension. We were playing Getafe and we were going to take off Cristiano in the second half. We’d spoken about it at half-time. I said: ‘Cris, we’re going to take you off in this minute,’ and he said: ‘Who’s coming on for me?’ I actually put on Martin Odegaard and it was his debut for the club. Is that a claim to fame? I could say to some of the Swansea players if I take them off and they shake their head: ‘I’ve taken off Cristiano Ronaldo, so I can take you off.’”
Clement delivered that last line with a chuckle. Speaking to the media for the first time since replacing Bob Bradley, the 44-year-old came across as a man delighted to be managing again and still enjoying the adrenaline rush from Tuesday night’s 2-1 victory over Crystal Palace. “I felt more excited to be on the touchline than at a Bayern game when you’re an assistant,” he said. “You feel a lot more when you’re head coach and that win felt very special.”
The easy decision would have been to stay at Bayern Munich, where Clement was working alongside Ancelotti for the fourth time, following spells at Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid. Clement said he “felt comfortable at that level”, yet ultimately he wanted far more than to be a No2. “I’ve never settled for that; I want to feel the pressure because the worst thing about pressure is having none of it,” he explained. “It’s nice to have pressure – it makes you feel alive.”
There is no shortage of pressure in the Premier League relegation zone. Swansea are second bottom with 15 points from 20 matches and Clement, who had eight months in charge of Derby County last season, admitted that keeping the club up was the biggest challenge of his career. He hopes to bring in new faces this month and has added a few names to the list the board assembled before he arrived, with an answer to a question about Frank Lampard’s potential availability suggesting that the former England international may well have been sounded out without success. “My impression from people close to him is that he is going to take a break from the game,” Clement said.
Either way, Clement believes there are solutions to be found on the pitches at the training ground and not just via the chequebook. “There are capable and able footballers here,” he said. “I think over recent games to ship three goals, four goals, five goals – I’m confident in my ability as a coach that that won’t happen during my reign. I can’t say 100% it won’t – there is a lot of randomness in football. But I’m pretty confident it won’t happen because I can get a team organised. With the players that I’ve currently got, I think I can get them more organised than they’ve been, give them a bit of solidity in the defensive work and that’s the foundation to build what they’ve already shown they can be good at, which is the offensive side.”
Clement adopted a similarly pragmatic approach at Derby, during his only other experience as a manager, but was sacked last February with the club fifth in the Championship. “I often get asked about my time at Derby and there’s a lot of contrasting views about what happened, from a harsh dismissal or – an interesting one I read the other day – my time at Derby was ‘an absolute disaster’. The only important thing about that is how I felt and I think about it as a positive experience. I learned a lot.”
The only negative aspect to Clement’s press conference surrounded the future of Alan Curtis, who has been told he will no longer have a role with the first team. Curtis, who had three spells as a player at Swansea and is a club legend in the eyes of the supporters, will meet Huw Jenkins, the chairman, on Friday to discuss another position. It is understood that Jenkins initially contacted Curtis via text and it is hard to escape the feeling that the whole episode could have been handled much better. “He won’t be on the training field and won’t be on the bench but we want him around and having that communication with players,” Clement said. “We respect him and the club respects him for what he’s done here. I really hope he finds a role he’s happy with at Swansea.”
As for Clement and his relationship with Ancelotti, there seems little prospect of them working together again. “That’s it now,” said Clement, smiling, when asked whether he could envisage being reunited with the Italian again. “We have not spoken about that and I don’t think we need to. I suppose it is never say never, but the chances of that happening are less than before. All my focus is on being successful here and not doing that again.”
