By last winter Villas-Boas had become so stressed that, instead of returning home to his wife and two small daughers, he sometimes spent the night at Chelsea's Cobham training ground, sleeping in a Japanese style pod. On those occasions when his black BMW four-wheel-drive remained in the car park overnight, Villas-Boas invariably rose before dawn in order to study statistical data.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. It was Mr. Eckersley, Chelsea's Wombat-flipping Department secretary. "You alright there, André, luv?" - in his hand, a freshly brewed cup of coffee from the finest jungles of French Guyana (a present, in fact, from Florence Malouda), whose deep, acerbic smell soon stunk up the tiny Japanese pod. "Sorry, old bean, still working you see...", André replied. - "Well, mind if I join you in there?"
"... thought you'd never ask."