The man who can fix anything: Carlo Ancelotti defies time and critics

Perhaps the best insight into how Carlo Ancelotti manages big games came as the final whistle blew at the Bernabéu this month, with Real Madrid leading Manchester City 2-1 and another 30 minutes in prospect. While Pep Guardiola drew his players into a tight huddle, explaining exactly what he needed from them, Ancelotti calmly strolled over to Marcelo and Toni Kroos on the substitutes’ bench and asked them who they thought he should bring on in extra time. Because he wasn’t really sure.

Of course if Real had lost that game and City qualified for the Champions League final, you could easily spin that anecdote into a tale about how a passive Ancelotti lost the plot, about how Guardiola’s clear-headed gameplan won the day. Ancelotti has seen and done it all at club level, and yet he is often the first to admit that the first secret of management is that you need a little luck.

Even so, there was something startlingly apostate to it: the pivotal point of a Champions League semi-final, and you decide to delegate your last big call to your senior players. The prevailing orthodoxy of modern coaching is control: control of the ball, control of the situation, high intensity and high stress. And yet in that moment Ancelotti relinquished control, handed over the keys to a decision for which he would ultimately be held responsible. “It describes him perfectly as a coach,” Kroos said afterwards.

Naturally this speaks to the popular caricature of Ancelotti as a manager from the laid-back, carefree school: the jolly cigar-smoking uncle, the sort of guy who can fix anything, a man who just instinctively knows how to work a barbecue. To a large extent that calmness is a facade, a persona as carefully crafted as the touchline thespianism