Sex, Doping & Tactics: Helenio Herrera's remarkable life | Richard Fitzpatrick | OFF THE BALL BREAKFAST
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Who is Helenio Herrera and why is he significant in football history?
Off the ball. Rugby. The key thing about the whole performance, and particularly Gibson Park's performance, was he reasserted himself as a running threat, which he hadn't done in the first two games. He only carried the ball three times in Paris. He had no carries in his half an hour in the pitch against Italy, and he had 13 in Saturday. And several of them were clean breaks. Join in the obsession. Subscribe now at offtheball.com forward slash join. Off the ball. Breakfast. Ireland's sports breakfast show. We are going to play you an interview that we did with Richard Fitzpatrick, the author. His new book is about Helenio Herrera. Arthur, you were very impressed with this. You picked it up and you were like, wow, beautiful cover.
And now it turns out the content matches the cover. Oh, it does. It's a great read. Great, great read. The book for a second for the aesthetic value. Chapeau, is that the word? To bluesery. Good Lord. I don't know how much involvement he had. I presume he had some involvement in the artistic design of it, but this thing is so well put together. There's a lot to be said for that. You could judge this book by its cover. You could. And you'd be correct. Favorably.
What themes are explored in Richard Fitzpatrick's book about Herrera?
Yeah, just an awful lot of great craft, great use of photographs. Everything about it, it was just really well, well done. So what is it for people? Jelena Herrera is most famous for his time at Inter where he won the European Cup with Carinaccio. Back to back. And it's kind of, you know, obviously there's the great Real Madrid team and then there's Jelena Herrera's Inter. I didn't know anything else about him just from like, you know, you're a kid, you read the books. I can say this to Richard at the start of it. But there's a doping scandal. Kind of it emerges funnily enough more towards the end because it happened when he was at Roma. But the running theme throughout is just that doping in some form or another was right, right across football.
So particularly, I don't know how prevalent it was in England. But certainly in... Well, they never dealt with England. No, but I just, I don't know. I don't know how prevalent it was. Perhaps it was. I'm not being naive. It's just, I think that is raised in there. It's just not the same culture of it. Just a lot of use of amphetamines and speed and everything else, but... Nothing serious. Which? Nothing serious. Well, yeah, I mean, it resulted in a rough old end for some people. But it's, I mean, he was a, for all intents and purposes, a fairly heavy prescriber of such medicines. But now I don't know. I don't know what importance you put in that.
This is the 60s.
Yeah, from the 50s into the 60s into the 70s, the very early 70s. Early doping. His last...
How did Herrera's personality influence his coaching style?
His last interim stint as manager of Barcelona is in the 80-81 season or 79-80 season. And he's manager for 36 games. So it wasn't like a... So would Celtic have beaten this team under... Okay. And there's great stuff. I think he really does really well. Because obviously, I know... Well, I'd known Richard Fitzpatrick's work through the La Liga or the Classico book he wrote about 15 years ago.
Mm-hmm.
I remember that being class. I remember that being so good and being so surprised that an Irish author had done it. You wouldn't have factored in. You just wouldn't have thought it was doable. That kind of book. There's loads of people who've written from outside their own perspective. Graham wrote a brilliant book on Barstow, a brilliant book on Spain in 2010, but he was in the camp, kind of. It was a brilliant thing, brilliant book, but this was quite different. He was somewhat outside it, looking in. He lives in Barcelona, obviously, but you're still kind of, it's a journalist's perspective rather than in camp. So when this one came out, it's a brave topic in terms of, like, you were talking earlier about doing the test around the office for Snoop versus Tiger.
I would suspect the number of people who had even heard of Elenio Herrera would be fairly low in the general population. And maybe that owes to why they went to such effort to make it such a beautiful thing to look at as well.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Helenio Herrera and why is he significant in football history?
0:00–1:08
2
What themes are explored in Richard Fitzpatrick's book about Herrera?
1:08–2:47
3
How did Herrera's personality influence his coaching style?
2:47–5:03
4
What role did doping scandals play in Herrera's career?
5:03–7:22
5
How did Herrera's tactics shape modern football coaching?
7:22–8:52
6
What impact did Herrera have on the teams he managed?
8:52–11:14
7
Why is Herrera often compared to modern football managers like Mourinho?
11:14–13:00
8
What personal challenges did Herrera face throughout his life?
13:00–39:44
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from OTB Football
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